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You’d be lucky to fit a Stormlight book into 10 hours, let alone 2 and a half
A Mistborn movie trilogy could work, but Stormlight would *have* to be a TV series
Also Mistborn would be better for animation than Stormlight (excepting Stormlight's rock-based geology), I've always been worried about how they plan to show people burning metals that don't have direct effects, but think it would be less agregious in animation
it's faaar easier to make mistborn as a live action than stormlight.
the storms, the flora and fauna, the fact people are of distinct races that don't always look like real life races, all the different magics, the msmy different locations etc
with mistborn the environment is easy for a live action, the special effects are also nothing special.
You listed all of that and neglected to list the spren constantly everywhere.
In live action, it’s going to be difficult to pull that off and it not be overcrowded.
The one thing I think is massively over looked in a Stormlight Archives adaptation is the rythms of the Parshendi. You basically need a distinct and recognisable rythm for every emotion / state of mind. A faithful adaptation of this is insanely hard to do.
I think it could be done with different colored auras glowing around them which in lore are just visible to us the viewers, kind of like the demon slayers sword styles where the elemental effects are only visible to the viewers
Honestly that’s the only way I think it could be done, I think creating hundreds of distinct and recognizable sounds and having the viewers automatically know what emotion they convey is incredibly difficult. Having like a red aura for anger or a deep blue for sorrow.
This is why animation would serve the Cosmere, and in particular Stormlight, so well. You can convey things with certain animation styles that would just feel totally out of place in live action.
>I've always been worried about how they plan to show people burning metals that don't have direct effects
Simple - have a misting do some magic, then show someone burning bronze and seeing an aura or something around them.
And from then on you can have it be visible or not whenever you want.
The problem is that lord of the rings has a much wider pull to be able to give animation a try. Stormlight doesn't. The amount of casual audience that knows Tolkien and his works far outstrips Sanderson.
I want it animation just as much as others, but the numbers aren't in his favor to make it worth the investment.
I’m no expert in movie/anime finances, but wouldn’t an anime like this be far cheaper than a live action show/movie with the intense CGI needed for spren, Stormlight, etc?
The problem is audience. Most casual adults do not watch animated material. Sanderson has said in the past that you can't make a show just for your niche following. That won't be near enough people to offset the costs. So he has to aim for getting the largest casual audience
I don't think this stereotype is true anymore.
You don't think Stormlight can attract a similar crowd as Avatar, Arcane, or Invincible? You don't think enough adults have grown up on anime now?
Look at where the culture is going my friend, the West needs to wake up and realize the potential of animation
And none of the shows you mentioned is as big as GoT or the Lotr trilogy.
And that's probably what Brando is aiming for.
I can see more niche cosmere books being animated, like Tress, Yumi, Warbreaker... But the big ones, Stormlight and Mistborn, will 100% be live action.
They’re still big franchises. If the idea of an adaptation is “Be one of the biggest and most popular shows/movies of all time or don’t do it all” I don’t think it will ever happen
>And none of the shows you mentioned is as big as GoT or the Lotr trilogy.
Neither are Sandos books. Nor will Stormlight ever be.
"As popular as GoT" is not a realistic metric. One of Stormlight's strengths is how unabashedly fantastical it is. It's not a "gateway fantasy" so it's not realistic to compare them.
Mistborn can absolutely be compared to mainstream series, or even popular YA series. So throw money at it and make it the next Hunger Games, sure.
Stormlight's ceiling is similar to something like ATLA or Attack on Titan. Still a big cultural force but it's gonna be more niche than LOTR.
It straight up does not make sense as a live action. A quality animation will be far more successful than a mediocre live action. Look at Wheel of Time compared to all those "niche" animated shows.
Recapturing GoT's success as a TV show isn't a sure thing for anyone, but Stormlight is already more popular than GoT was before the TV series came out.
They aren't comparing mediocre live action to quality animation, they're comparing quality live action to quality live action. It's easier to do quality animation than quality live action, but nobody's shooting for shit-tier live action.
I mean, to your last point, WoT seems to have a show runner and writers that do not want to follow the source material but instead tell their own story. As a fan of WoT, I stopped watching the show. On the otherhand, BS has indicated that if his products are licensed out to TV or movie deals that he will be heavily involved in them. I don't think the comparison stands.
You made your own point entirely separate from the one he was making cuz you know he’s right. It’s not about following the source material, it’s the fact that wheel of time is so clearly made on a tv budget with a tv vfx crew and doesn’t have the capabilities to make the fantastical elements look as good as they could in a movie. A Stormlight show would look like cheaply made garbage after the first season, which already still needs a lot of cgi
That's not at all my point. No where in my statement did I indicate anything about anything you stated, I explicitly discussed the deviation from source material as one of the things that put fans like myself off from the show. The OP used WoT as a comparison to those anime, the implication being that it failed due to how fantastical it is and their failure to meet those expectations in a live action show. My point to them was that it failed not because of the graphics and medium it's portrayed in, but because it's not actually WoT, it's something else calling itself WoT.
All of the shows mentioned also cost a fraction of a fraction of what GOT cost (except Arkaine but they were developing technology to make better cutscenes and animated shows)
Sure they don't have the same reach, but they are still quite profitable for their cost.
That may not be as true in this day and age as I know a surprising amount of 30+ something typical-everyday adults deep in redneck America who are getting into anime through mainstream shows like One Piece. Now we have zoomers becoming adults who are an even bigger fanbase of animated content.
Those 30+ millennials also grew up on anime, Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon were Saturday morning cartoons when we were kids and Naruto and Dragon Ball was after school TV when we were in our mid teens.
I really don't understand the general Hollywood wisdom that adult, non-comedy, animation is doomed to fail.
I think it's less "you can't make a show just for the niche followers" and more "I don't want to make a show just for the niche followers" - his goal with the adaptation is to reach new audience more than cater to us who already know these stories.
True... my uncle refuses to watch Invincible just because it's animated and no other reason, even though I know he'd love it...
Some people just won't take animated television seriously, no matter how good it is.
Yes. Adapting Stormlight as a live action production would be astronomically expensive (to do it well, that is). Animation is expensive too but adapting each Stormlight book in live action would likely cost several hundred million dollars per.
Arcane won (9?) major awards and has a near flawless rotten tomatoes review. It's based on a niche* game with a toxic player base, yet was enjoyed by people who have never played a computer game or heard of Runeterra (including my elderly parents).
If done well, *really well*, there is no reason the Coamere couldn't translate into beautiful and popular screen production.
*Yes I know LoL is massive, but outside of its fanbase there is a significant amount of the world which has never heard of it, at all.
One of the major factors in LoL's ability to do that is its Asian market, particularly China. I'd love to actually know how large Sanderson's audience is and it's demographics. But I doubt it comes close to be able to support a 6 year production time and a 90-100 million dollar budget (~10 million per episode).
Netflix isn't available in China, or popular in most/(any?) other Asian countries - but Arcane sat at the top of the charts of most viewed on Netflix for a decent while, including most viewed in individual countries (inc the US I believe).
We don't need the existing fanbase to bankroll the development, afterall the vast majority of LOTR movie fans have never read the books and never will. Game of Thrones was *far* bigger than the book readers.
I’d be far more worried about a terrible Wheel of Time or Rings of Power outcome that will die out before completing the story than an animation, that may not have casual appeal but will sustain through the entire story
An Arcane level animation would be amazing
True, but hopefully the increase in these animation type projects that do have a wider audience reach helps get people used to animation and makes them more willing to give other unheard of animations a try.
Hard disagree.
I am okay with animated, but anime itself is absolutely not the way to go. Would prefer to have a Spiderverse/TMNT type personally, but I know thats probably hella expensive.
Live-action would honestly be the best, CGI can be amazing if done right.
The visuals in arcane a mind blowing
https://preview.redd.it/ulb01q86576d1.jpeg?width=1914&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ba1c68233b243dfb3e457a57b06a64daef2ab1af
Me too. I don't want anime Shardbearers where they exaggerate the most basic sword slash with slow mo and a thousand different angles. I want to see a display of actual skill when they use these oversized swords.
It's either live action or spiderverse/arcane style animation for me. I'd actually be OK with Arcane
Nothing you describe is specific to the art style of anime, and could be a pitfall of any animation or even live action production. What you're concerned about is art direction, not art style.
Sure, it may be common especially in the more mainstream genres (shonen, etc.) but anime is a super broad genre and you're really pigeon holing it here. At the end of the day, the media means nothing. The studio and director are the deciding factors when it comes to how the action is portrayed and how grounded things are.
I hope not, say what you want, but the animated series will never be as popular as a movie/series could be, to kneecap one of the two pillars of the Cosmere by making it animated would be foolish, maybe there could be an adaptation later on, but the first thing must be either a movie or a big streaming service show like GoT.
I think all the live action adaptations recently have been failing to satisfy current fans and failing to draw in new fans because they were trying to be a big new GoT/Star Wars etc. Trying to make a LA blockbuster is a mistake. Yes, animated shows may have a smaller audience, but that just means they can be more faithful and good for the current fans.
A lot of it has to do with lack of adherence to source material. Rings of Power, Halo, Witcher, Wheel of Time, etc. all refused to follow the source material, though to be fair to Rings of Power, they didn't have access to the source material.
Stormlight probably won't have that issue, but I do think an animated show would be better than a live action, because it's less risky, it's cheaper, and it's easier to make a live action adaptation of a beloved animated series than it is to make an animated series of a crappy live action.
Those ones generally were not loyal because they (studios) were trying to make big blockbuster shows. The larger a project is, the more the studio limits the creative team to actually produce quality shows. Studios are less likely to interfere with small projects or animation.
IIRC, for the Witcher, the showrunner was given complete control. The problem is that a lot of creatives want to remake it in their own image, because it's not the source material they love, it's their ego.
No, nothing was stopping the current crop of adaptations from being faithful(both WoT and RoP had the money), other than the creatives working on them wanting to put their own mark on it(and that mark being shit), which is why Brandon is demanding full creative control.
So no, the LA adaptation remains the best choice.
Definitely not. That's the worst type of animation for Stormlight Archive imo. It's too stiff and awkward. Anime is probably the best animation style for fast-paced action.
Season 7 isn't stiff and awkward and is literally about war. But I'm not here to advocate for Clone Wars style animation nearly as much as I'm here to advocate not turning Stormlight into another anime. Sanderson doesn't watch anime either, so I'm hoping he steers clear if it.
Live action has always been shit for high fantasy. Case in point see what happened to Wheel of Time. There's some things you can't properly convey and animation allows for that. I almost physically cringe whenever I try to visualize shardblades, Szeth walking on walls or Syl/Pattern or the Rythyms made in that fuzzy Netflix-ass cinematography.
[The Wheel of Time Origins](https://youtu.be/etfUTEmCfqU) episodes made by iwot Productions is where I'll always point people toward who ask why animation is better for doing justice to this genre. Just look at the scale of the environments, the fall of Manetheren and the brilliantly executed depiction of Saidin and Saidar (especially compared to the Harry Potter stuff in the actual series).
And that's considering they were given a budget of peanuts. I'm positive they'll do a banger job with the White Tower animated series.
I would argue you could probably manage mistborn as live action, but something like stormlight will have problems. Might be wrong about MB because I'm like halfway through well of ascension, but SLA will either need to be overly condensed, overly expensive, or special effects will not look good/age well as we see from lower fantasy like GoT.
Anime and animation is the only financially possible way to adapt Stormlight while keeping the scope and world right. People talk about Avengers level of investment which is misguided, it's not Avengers Level it's AVATAR level
You don't only need big budget and mediocre production, you need a production with money and quality of a genius like James Cameron or Denis Villeneuve behind, because no amount of money is enough to cover the humongous number of time and effort dedicated to get art, world building, CGI right. It's an alien planet equally alien with fauna, flora and reliefs. You have to account the time needed to bring Tolkien-level of civilizations to life, which one with specific culture, art, architecture, costumes, and even language. Even the humans are storming hard to adapt considering how vastly alien some human ethnicities can be
If you guys want live action so badly then expected to watch not Stormlight Archive but rather a story only loosely based in Stormlight
Yeah, if Stormlight gets a live action adaptation I'm confident that it'd be a 5/10 max. If it was an anime, at least the voice acting and animation is pretty much guaranteed to be great. You'd just need good direction to put it into the 9-10/10 tier. Sadly, most people here would rather take that 5/10 live action because of reaching audiences or something (even though animation has never not been massive).
I really think animation is the only way to do Stormlight justice. Mistborn and other Cosmere stories could be done in live action but Stormlight is so broad, so long, and so obviously magical that to make it look anything like it should would be so cost prohibitive that most studios wouldn’t touch it.
I may be in the minority here but I just don’t see how you can translate Stormlight into live action without losing so much of what makes it unique.
Yeah one of the things I’ve been thinking about is how they would convey the rhythms in an adaptation, especially with how prevalent they become in the latest books and how key they are to how the parshendi communicate as well as their culture
I'm sorry, but this does not appeal to me at all. I realize I'm in the minority on this sub, but I want a live action adaptation, with live actors bringing the characters I've come to know and love to life. That's what is important to me, not whether the cgi spren look realistic or not.
I think a live action adaptation would be cooler if done right but I think animation would be far easier to get the scale/world of Roshar across. Higher highs for a potential live action but I could see it having lower lows
I can’t think of any “live action” films that have been able to capture a real fantastical aesthetic like that of Roshar except maybe Avatar 1&2 which are some of the most expensive movies ever made. Even with some of the biggest backing he could possibly find I don’t think any studio could feasibly get the funding to undertake such a thing. I too, would love a live-action version, but the realist in me has to concede that our best chance of getting a full-scope adaptation of Stormlight would *have* to be animation.
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You do realize half the things in Stormlight would require CGI, right? And that’s good CGI. Just look at Netflix’s Avatar, 2 years in post-production just for the bending scenes and the best I can say is they’re alright compared to the cartoon.
Sorry, but Mistborn and SA would not work in live action.
I agree but I would be open to an initial animated adaptation for one of the novels or Mistborn to bring in a wider audience and funding for a live action version in the future
I wouldn't be opposed to live action despite preferring animation. But everyone and their mother knows SA is impossible to translate to live action. Hell, take One Piece live action for example, early One Piece has way lower scale, requires significantly less CGI than live action SA will, and had stupidly massive budget. With all that on its side, it had to scale everything down significantly, cutting out entire battles and even 1 vs. 1 fights because the budget couldn't handle it.
I'm normally not a huge anime fan, but that often has to do with the stories and the way they handle a lot of other things. But I believe that for the wider cosmere an animated series with serious talent in the VA department would be the best choice. At least regarding Stormlight. Mistborn would probably be easier to do life action, but the ecology, spren and later fight scenes are really really really hard to pull off of a TV budget in life action.
Also: it really needs a unique style imo. A lot of anime is rather generic to my eyes.
i think if the cosmere gets adapted, it should be loads of different styles, but for stormlight id kill for animated. anime would work best, give it the same budget and hype as most shonen animes (and advertise it as such) and it would be amazing.
I've read the entire Cosmere like 5 times and I probably wouldn't watch it, if it were made into an anime. Sanderson isn't an anime fan and doesn't want Stormlight to be an anime.
from what ive seen, he said he liked some anime moveis. and even if, id rather it be animated in generaly than specifically an anime. if you dont mind me asking, why wouldnt you like it if it was animated?
It just never interested me. I gave it an honest try. I made it through Yuyu and I watched some of Cowboy Bebop. I even fully understand why folks think it makes sense to make SA an anime, as there are quite a few moments or scenes that almost read like Shonen anime, even if Sanderson has said that he doesn't care for anime. There is just something about it that I don't connect to. It's not animation, it's like anime specifically.
oh ok. to each their own, but just imagine a wind runner with attack on titan animation, or lightweaving with demon slayer style swordplay. to each their own, but i feel like if they are going to animate it, anime would just be the best. (although, i can agree that they should try not to make it overly anime-ey)
although, for me its just not being able to see it as live action. there could be great actors, but it would just end up being way to drab and alot like the percy jackson tv show (not that i hate pjotv, loved it but like most people i agree it should have been animated)
Brandon has said a number of times he doesn’t want to do any kind of anime adaptation but every single time a new anime comes out we get a post like this.
I’m tired of trying to remind people of this. It’s specifically Brando that doesn’t want to. The point of an adaptation is to bring a new, wider audience to the fold. Anime just doesn’t accomplish the point of an adaptation, that is, appealing to the masses.
I think Stormlight would need a *lot* of work to adapt to TV since so much of it deals with mental issues and the characters' thoughts. I am interested in how well War of the Rohirrim does though, since I'd really like to see some of Sanderson's books done that way.
I’ve thought about it and I really don’t want them to even try and do anything with Stormlight. It’s too complex, the magic is too bizarre, I can’t see a way to show spren without it looking comical, same for showing the surges. Let the books stand alone, they’re perfect!
Mistborn, though. I could get behind Mistborn.
I don’t get this. Even if it’s a bad adaptation it doesn’t change anything about the books. The books and adaptations are 2 separate things and it’s worth giving a shot.
A bad adaptation of a thing I love is sad to see. There's also another element that taints my view of things and that's that I'm a life long comic book fan and those adaptations have brought in a really weird, broad, and often extremely vocal and toxic element of people to the fandom to the extent that myself and a lot of the people that I know have stopped participating in communities online and going to conventions. I distinctly remember being at a comic book convention in the early 2000s when it was shifting from being about comics culture to being about pop culture and ton of mean, bro-ish dudes being there and being awful and harassing people for being "nerds" at a freaking comic book convention and realized the jig was up - what used to a subversive, subcultural experience that felt special had been co-opted by the masses and now frat boys in Iron Man shirts were harassing women at a comic book convention that I used to love to attend.
I love these books because I think they're great books, they'll always be great books. I agree that making a bunch of crappy Amazon shows based on these books won't make these books bad, but it will certainly change things.
I like that I can see communities like this online without massive amounts of vitriol and fighting for the most part (as long as nobody mentions them in r/fantasy) and when media that is based in literature gets turned into media that that people who don't read consume, my experience over the last four decades has been that it has a drastic change on the subcultures based around that formerly-literature-based media.
I seriously don't want the Cosmere to become a bunch of Anime.
I really do hope that we will see actual people carry an actual wooden bridge in the future.
Nahhh I still want a live action Stormlight adaptation. I mean, if he chooses an animated one I won't complain, I'll be happy with whatever. But I want a live action one more.
An animated show just feels right. All the details like spren, shardplate, even the animals and environments would give it such a unique vibe if the art direction was well executed. The changing perspectives also feels like it’d lend itself more to a show. I’d take a ghibli inspired look or something like the 3D/2D blend newer animated movies are using
I think anime would fit stormlight better than an Live Action series. Flying the way they do would look goofy with actors but anything can look cool animated.
I don’t want an anime. Cutesy anime faces and choppy motions annoy the hell out of me. I do think animation is the right medium, but not anime. I prefer the style Arcane went with or Invincible.
Exactly. Anime in general is not a style I like. I only picked those three because they’re easily recognizable. I didn’t want to list all the shows I’ve tried.
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You’d be lucky to fit a Stormlight book into 10 hours, let alone 2 and a half A Mistborn movie trilogy could work, but Stormlight would *have* to be a TV series
I tried to summarize book one to the fiance. It didn't go well
I did this when i finished book 1 the first time.. ended up talking non stop for 2 hours
And hopefully not done by Amazon \^\^'
Also Mistborn would be better for animation than Stormlight (excepting Stormlight's rock-based geology), I've always been worried about how they plan to show people burning metals that don't have direct effects, but think it would be less agregious in animation
it's faaar easier to make mistborn as a live action than stormlight. the storms, the flora and fauna, the fact people are of distinct races that don't always look like real life races, all the different magics, the msmy different locations etc with mistborn the environment is easy for a live action, the special effects are also nothing special.
You listed all of that and neglected to list the spren constantly everywhere. In live action, it’s going to be difficult to pull that off and it not be overcrowded.
The one thing I think is massively over looked in a Stormlight Archives adaptation is the rythms of the Parshendi. You basically need a distinct and recognisable rythm for every emotion / state of mind. A faithful adaptation of this is insanely hard to do.
I think it could be done with different colored auras glowing around them which in lore are just visible to us the viewers, kind of like the demon slayers sword styles where the elemental effects are only visible to the viewers
Honestly that’s the only way I think it could be done, I think creating hundreds of distinct and recognizable sounds and having the viewers automatically know what emotion they convey is incredibly difficult. Having like a red aura for anger or a deep blue for sorrow. This is why animation would serve the Cosmere, and in particular Stormlight, so well. You can convey things with certain animation styles that would just feel totally out of place in live action.
Sorry but what other type of geology is there?
>I've always been worried about how they plan to show people burning metals that don't have direct effects Simple - have a misting do some magic, then show someone burning bronze and seeing an aura or something around them. And from then on you can have it be visible or not whenever you want.
Yeah, I hope it can convince brandon that an anime adaptation could work
The problem is that lord of the rings has a much wider pull to be able to give animation a try. Stormlight doesn't. The amount of casual audience that knows Tolkien and his works far outstrips Sanderson. I want it animation just as much as others, but the numbers aren't in his favor to make it worth the investment.
I’m no expert in movie/anime finances, but wouldn’t an anime like this be far cheaper than a live action show/movie with the intense CGI needed for spren, Stormlight, etc?
The problem is audience. Most casual adults do not watch animated material. Sanderson has said in the past that you can't make a show just for your niche following. That won't be near enough people to offset the costs. So he has to aim for getting the largest casual audience
Critical Role did it, and I think it went pretty well. Kickstarter for an animated show might help as well.
I loved Vox Machina! Stormlight could really be done in the same way and I'd be happy.
I don't think he gets to call himself niche anymore seeing as how the four secret novels was the most successful Kickstarter of all time.
I don't think this stereotype is true anymore. You don't think Stormlight can attract a similar crowd as Avatar, Arcane, or Invincible? You don't think enough adults have grown up on anime now? Look at where the culture is going my friend, the West needs to wake up and realize the potential of animation
And none of the shows you mentioned is as big as GoT or the Lotr trilogy. And that's probably what Brando is aiming for. I can see more niche cosmere books being animated, like Tress, Yumi, Warbreaker... But the big ones, Stormlight and Mistborn, will 100% be live action.
They’re still big franchises. If the idea of an adaptation is “Be one of the biggest and most popular shows/movies of all time or don’t do it all” I don’t think it will ever happen
>And none of the shows you mentioned is as big as GoT or the Lotr trilogy. Neither are Sandos books. Nor will Stormlight ever be. "As popular as GoT" is not a realistic metric. One of Stormlight's strengths is how unabashedly fantastical it is. It's not a "gateway fantasy" so it's not realistic to compare them. Mistborn can absolutely be compared to mainstream series, or even popular YA series. So throw money at it and make it the next Hunger Games, sure. Stormlight's ceiling is similar to something like ATLA or Attack on Titan. Still a big cultural force but it's gonna be more niche than LOTR. It straight up does not make sense as a live action. A quality animation will be far more successful than a mediocre live action. Look at Wheel of Time compared to all those "niche" animated shows.
Recapturing GoT's success as a TV show isn't a sure thing for anyone, but Stormlight is already more popular than GoT was before the TV series came out. They aren't comparing mediocre live action to quality animation, they're comparing quality live action to quality live action. It's easier to do quality animation than quality live action, but nobody's shooting for shit-tier live action.
I mean, to your last point, WoT seems to have a show runner and writers that do not want to follow the source material but instead tell their own story. As a fan of WoT, I stopped watching the show. On the otherhand, BS has indicated that if his products are licensed out to TV or movie deals that he will be heavily involved in them. I don't think the comparison stands.
You made your own point entirely separate from the one he was making cuz you know he’s right. It’s not about following the source material, it’s the fact that wheel of time is so clearly made on a tv budget with a tv vfx crew and doesn’t have the capabilities to make the fantastical elements look as good as they could in a movie. A Stormlight show would look like cheaply made garbage after the first season, which already still needs a lot of cgi
That's not at all my point. No where in my statement did I indicate anything about anything you stated, I explicitly discussed the deviation from source material as one of the things that put fans like myself off from the show. The OP used WoT as a comparison to those anime, the implication being that it failed due to how fantastical it is and their failure to meet those expectations in a live action show. My point to them was that it failed not because of the graphics and medium it's portrayed in, but because it's not actually WoT, it's something else calling itself WoT.
All of the shows mentioned also cost a fraction of a fraction of what GOT cost (except Arkaine but they were developing technology to make better cutscenes and animated shows) Sure they don't have the same reach, but they are still quite profitable for their cost.
With all its fancifal use of colors for magic and setting, Warbreaker would look really cool in a styalized animated limited series.
That may not be as true in this day and age as I know a surprising amount of 30+ something typical-everyday adults deep in redneck America who are getting into anime through mainstream shows like One Piece. Now we have zoomers becoming adults who are an even bigger fanbase of animated content.
Those 30+ millennials also grew up on anime, Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon were Saturday morning cartoons when we were kids and Naruto and Dragon Ball was after school TV when we were in our mid teens. I really don't understand the general Hollywood wisdom that adult, non-comedy, animation is doomed to fail.
I think it's less "you can't make a show just for the niche followers" and more "I don't want to make a show just for the niche followers" - his goal with the adaptation is to reach new audience more than cater to us who already know these stories.
True... my uncle refuses to watch Invincible just because it's animated and no other reason, even though I know he'd love it... Some people just won't take animated television seriously, no matter how good it is.
Yes. Adapting Stormlight as a live action production would be astronomically expensive (to do it well, that is). Animation is expensive too but adapting each Stormlight book in live action would likely cost several hundred million dollars per.
Arcane won (9?) major awards and has a near flawless rotten tomatoes review. It's based on a niche* game with a toxic player base, yet was enjoyed by people who have never played a computer game or heard of Runeterra (including my elderly parents). If done well, *really well*, there is no reason the Coamere couldn't translate into beautiful and popular screen production. *Yes I know LoL is massive, but outside of its fanbase there is a significant amount of the world which has never heard of it, at all.
One of the major factors in LoL's ability to do that is its Asian market, particularly China. I'd love to actually know how large Sanderson's audience is and it's demographics. But I doubt it comes close to be able to support a 6 year production time and a 90-100 million dollar budget (~10 million per episode).
Netflix isn't available in China, or popular in most/(any?) other Asian countries - but Arcane sat at the top of the charts of most viewed on Netflix for a decent while, including most viewed in individual countries (inc the US I believe). We don't need the existing fanbase to bankroll the development, afterall the vast majority of LOTR movie fans have never read the books and never will. Game of Thrones was *far* bigger than the book readers.
I’d be far more worried about a terrible Wheel of Time or Rings of Power outcome that will die out before completing the story than an animation, that may not have casual appeal but will sustain through the entire story An Arcane level animation would be amazing
True, but hopefully the increase in these animation type projects that do have a wider audience reach helps get people used to animation and makes them more willing to give other unheard of animations a try.
Hard disagree. I am okay with animated, but anime itself is absolutely not the way to go. Would prefer to have a Spiderverse/TMNT type personally, but I know thats probably hella expensive. Live-action would honestly be the best, CGI can be amazing if done right.
The visuals in arcane a mind blowing https://preview.redd.it/ulb01q86576d1.jpeg?width=1914&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ba1c68233b243dfb3e457a57b06a64daef2ab1af
Fortiche did a fantastic job
https://preview.redd.it/wuj0rljb576d1.jpeg?width=1891&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=10297b0966fb1681f2f724a930ea81dd7354105a Almost Scadrial
Me too. I don't want anime Shardbearers where they exaggerate the most basic sword slash with slow mo and a thousand different angles. I want to see a display of actual skill when they use these oversized swords. It's either live action or spiderverse/arcane style animation for me. I'd actually be OK with Arcane
Nothing you describe is specific to the art style of anime, and could be a pitfall of any animation or even live action production. What you're concerned about is art direction, not art style.
It is most common with anime a 2d animations
Sure, it may be common especially in the more mainstream genres (shonen, etc.) but anime is a super broad genre and you're really pigeon holing it here. At the end of the day, the media means nothing. The studio and director are the deciding factors when it comes to how the action is portrayed and how grounded things are.
I haven't seen Arcane, but google search looks good. I'd be down for that.
I posted pics 👆👆👆
I hope not, say what you want, but the animated series will never be as popular as a movie/series could be, to kneecap one of the two pillars of the Cosmere by making it animated would be foolish, maybe there could be an adaptation later on, but the first thing must be either a movie or a big streaming service show like GoT.
I think all the live action adaptations recently have been failing to satisfy current fans and failing to draw in new fans because they were trying to be a big new GoT/Star Wars etc. Trying to make a LA blockbuster is a mistake. Yes, animated shows may have a smaller audience, but that just means they can be more faithful and good for the current fans.
A lot of it has to do with lack of adherence to source material. Rings of Power, Halo, Witcher, Wheel of Time, etc. all refused to follow the source material, though to be fair to Rings of Power, they didn't have access to the source material. Stormlight probably won't have that issue, but I do think an animated show would be better than a live action, because it's less risky, it's cheaper, and it's easier to make a live action adaptation of a beloved animated series than it is to make an animated series of a crappy live action.
Those ones generally were not loyal because they (studios) were trying to make big blockbuster shows. The larger a project is, the more the studio limits the creative team to actually produce quality shows. Studios are less likely to interfere with small projects or animation.
IIRC, for the Witcher, the showrunner was given complete control. The problem is that a lot of creatives want to remake it in their own image, because it's not the source material they love, it's their ego.
No, nothing was stopping the current crop of adaptations from being faithful(both WoT and RoP had the money), other than the creatives working on them wanting to put their own mark on it(and that mark being shit), which is why Brandon is demanding full creative control. So no, the LA adaptation remains the best choice.
I don't. I'm fine with animation, but anime style would be near the bottom of my list of styles. I'd go with Clone Wars later seasons.
Definitely not. That's the worst type of animation for Stormlight Archive imo. It's too stiff and awkward. Anime is probably the best animation style for fast-paced action.
Season 7 isn't stiff and awkward and is literally about war. But I'm not here to advocate for Clone Wars style animation nearly as much as I'm here to advocate not turning Stormlight into another anime. Sanderson doesn't watch anime either, so I'm hoping he steers clear if it.
I’ve long said I’d prefer an animated adaptation and get downvoted to oblivion every time lol. It’s just much more flexible.
Anime production is so scuffed (and getting worse) I doubt this will happen :/
Ah yes, the long awaited duel: Vasher vs Shallan
Can't unsee it now
Live action has always been shit for high fantasy. Case in point see what happened to Wheel of Time. There's some things you can't properly convey and animation allows for that. I almost physically cringe whenever I try to visualize shardblades, Szeth walking on walls or Syl/Pattern or the Rythyms made in that fuzzy Netflix-ass cinematography. [The Wheel of Time Origins](https://youtu.be/etfUTEmCfqU) episodes made by iwot Productions is where I'll always point people toward who ask why animation is better for doing justice to this genre. Just look at the scale of the environments, the fall of Manetheren and the brilliantly executed depiction of Saidin and Saidar (especially compared to the Harry Potter stuff in the actual series). And that's considering they were given a budget of peanuts. I'm positive they'll do a banger job with the White Tower animated series.
I would argue you could probably manage mistborn as live action, but something like stormlight will have problems. Might be wrong about MB because I'm like halfway through well of ascension, but SLA will either need to be overly condensed, overly expensive, or special effects will not look good/age well as we see from lower fantasy like GoT.
Anime and animation is the only financially possible way to adapt Stormlight while keeping the scope and world right. People talk about Avengers level of investment which is misguided, it's not Avengers Level it's AVATAR level You don't only need big budget and mediocre production, you need a production with money and quality of a genius like James Cameron or Denis Villeneuve behind, because no amount of money is enough to cover the humongous number of time and effort dedicated to get art, world building, CGI right. It's an alien planet equally alien with fauna, flora and reliefs. You have to account the time needed to bring Tolkien-level of civilizations to life, which one with specific culture, art, architecture, costumes, and even language. Even the humans are storming hard to adapt considering how vastly alien some human ethnicities can be If you guys want live action so badly then expected to watch not Stormlight Archive but rather a story only loosely based in Stormlight
I have a recurring fantasy of being a multi-billionaire so I could give Sanderson a blank check to make the series as good as possible lol
Yeah, if Stormlight gets a live action adaptation I'm confident that it'd be a 5/10 max. If it was an anime, at least the voice acting and animation is pretty much guaranteed to be great. You'd just need good direction to put it into the 9-10/10 tier. Sadly, most people here would rather take that 5/10 live action because of reaching audiences or something (even though animation has never not been massive).
Exactly. I will always prefer quality over appeal.
I really think animation is the only way to do Stormlight justice. Mistborn and other Cosmere stories could be done in live action but Stormlight is so broad, so long, and so obviously magical that to make it look anything like it should would be so cost prohibitive that most studios wouldn’t touch it. I may be in the minority here but I just don’t see how you can translate Stormlight into live action without losing so much of what makes it unique.
I agree. Unless Brandon is given an insane budget, a live action Stormlight would look so goofy. Animated is the way to go
Yeah one of the things I’ve been thinking about is how they would convey the rhythms in an adaptation, especially with how prevalent they become in the latest books and how key they are to how the parshendi communicate as well as their culture
Additionally, animated adaptations tend to be more faithful because they are less studio micromanaged aiming at a bland blockbuster.
I'm sorry, but this does not appeal to me at all. I realize I'm in the minority on this sub, but I want a live action adaptation, with live actors bringing the characters I've come to know and love to life. That's what is important to me, not whether the cgi spren look realistic or not.
I think a live action adaptation would be cooler if done right but I think animation would be far easier to get the scale/world of Roshar across. Higher highs for a potential live action but I could see it having lower lows
I can’t think of any “live action” films that have been able to capture a real fantastical aesthetic like that of Roshar except maybe Avatar 1&2 which are some of the most expensive movies ever made. Even with some of the biggest backing he could possibly find I don’t think any studio could feasibly get the funding to undertake such a thing. I too, would love a live-action version, but the realist in me has to concede that our best chance of getting a full-scope adaptation of Stormlight would *have* to be animation.
I don't mind animation, but I do not want anime style animation. Doesn't appeal to me at all.
Ralph Bahksi Stormlight Archive hell yeah!
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You do realize half the things in Stormlight would require CGI, right? And that’s good CGI. Just look at Netflix’s Avatar, 2 years in post-production just for the bending scenes and the best I can say is they’re alright compared to the cartoon. Sorry, but Mistborn and SA would not work in live action.
I agree but I would be open to an initial animated adaptation for one of the novels or Mistborn to bring in a wider audience and funding for a live action version in the future
I wouldn't be opposed to live action despite preferring animation. But everyone and their mother knows SA is impossible to translate to live action. Hell, take One Piece live action for example, early One Piece has way lower scale, requires significantly less CGI than live action SA will, and had stupidly massive budget. With all that on its side, it had to scale everything down significantly, cutting out entire battles and even 1 vs. 1 fights because the budget couldn't handle it.
I'm normally not a huge anime fan, but that often has to do with the stories and the way they handle a lot of other things. But I believe that for the wider cosmere an animated series with serious talent in the VA department would be the best choice. At least regarding Stormlight. Mistborn would probably be easier to do life action, but the ecology, spren and later fight scenes are really really really hard to pull off of a TV budget in life action. Also: it really needs a unique style imo. A lot of anime is rather generic to my eyes.
i think if the cosmere gets adapted, it should be loads of different styles, but for stormlight id kill for animated. anime would work best, give it the same budget and hype as most shonen animes (and advertise it as such) and it would be amazing.
I've read the entire Cosmere like 5 times and I probably wouldn't watch it, if it were made into an anime. Sanderson isn't an anime fan and doesn't want Stormlight to be an anime.
from what ive seen, he said he liked some anime moveis. and even if, id rather it be animated in generaly than specifically an anime. if you dont mind me asking, why wouldnt you like it if it was animated?
It just never interested me. I gave it an honest try. I made it through Yuyu and I watched some of Cowboy Bebop. I even fully understand why folks think it makes sense to make SA an anime, as there are quite a few moments or scenes that almost read like Shonen anime, even if Sanderson has said that he doesn't care for anime. There is just something about it that I don't connect to. It's not animation, it's like anime specifically.
oh ok. to each their own, but just imagine a wind runner with attack on titan animation, or lightweaving with demon slayer style swordplay. to each their own, but i feel like if they are going to animate it, anime would just be the best. (although, i can agree that they should try not to make it overly anime-ey) although, for me its just not being able to see it as live action. there could be great actors, but it would just end up being way to drab and alot like the percy jackson tv show (not that i hate pjotv, loved it but like most people i agree it should have been animated)
Brandon has said a number of times he doesn’t want to do any kind of anime adaptation but every single time a new anime comes out we get a post like this.
I’m tired of trying to remind people of this. It’s specifically Brando that doesn’t want to. The point of an adaptation is to bring a new, wider audience to the fold. Anime just doesn’t accomplish the point of an adaptation, that is, appealing to the masses.
I think Stormlight would need a *lot* of work to adapt to TV since so much of it deals with mental issues and the characters' thoughts. I am interested in how well War of the Rohirrim does though, since I'd really like to see some of Sanderson's books done that way.
Anime is definitely the way to go for Stormlight.
I’ve thought about it and I really don’t want them to even try and do anything with Stormlight. It’s too complex, the magic is too bizarre, I can’t see a way to show spren without it looking comical, same for showing the surges. Let the books stand alone, they’re perfect! Mistborn, though. I could get behind Mistborn.
I hope it never gets adapted. I think a lot of these adaptations have been really dreadful.
I don’t get this. Even if it’s a bad adaptation it doesn’t change anything about the books. The books and adaptations are 2 separate things and it’s worth giving a shot.
A bad adaptation of a thing I love is sad to see. There's also another element that taints my view of things and that's that I'm a life long comic book fan and those adaptations have brought in a really weird, broad, and often extremely vocal and toxic element of people to the fandom to the extent that myself and a lot of the people that I know have stopped participating in communities online and going to conventions. I distinctly remember being at a comic book convention in the early 2000s when it was shifting from being about comics culture to being about pop culture and ton of mean, bro-ish dudes being there and being awful and harassing people for being "nerds" at a freaking comic book convention and realized the jig was up - what used to a subversive, subcultural experience that felt special had been co-opted by the masses and now frat boys in Iron Man shirts were harassing women at a comic book convention that I used to love to attend. I love these books because I think they're great books, they'll always be great books. I agree that making a bunch of crappy Amazon shows based on these books won't make these books bad, but it will certainly change things. I like that I can see communities like this online without massive amounts of vitriol and fighting for the most part (as long as nobody mentions them in r/fantasy) and when media that is based in literature gets turned into media that that people who don't read consume, my experience over the last four decades has been that it has a drastic change on the subcultures based around that formerly-literature-based media.
I seriously don't want the Cosmere to become a bunch of Anime. I really do hope that we will see actual people carry an actual wooden bridge in the future.
Hell nah. Don't let this happen to Stormlight.
I imagine everything in anime so I definitely want it to be an animation.
Nahhh I still want a live action Stormlight adaptation. I mean, if he chooses an animated one I won't complain, I'll be happy with whatever. But I want a live action one more.
Anime style animation makes me want to barf in the context of LOTR. Stormlight too.
Not a fan of that art style. I would prefer animation over live action but only if its more akin to Arcane than japanese animation
An animated show just feels right. All the details like spren, shardplate, even the animals and environments would give it such a unique vibe if the art direction was well executed. The changing perspectives also feels like it’d lend itself more to a show. I’d take a ghibli inspired look or something like the 3D/2D blend newer animated movies are using
Also how hard/expensive to depict roshar and shadesmar. Like you'll get way more indoor scenes in LA
I’d love to see SA or the Mistborn saga done by the studio that did Arcane.
If I can see an anime Cosmere before I die, I’d die a happy woman.
I’d rather them do a 20 episode season, standard 23 minute episodes, for each book.
I think anime would fit stormlight better than an Live Action series. Flying the way they do would look goofy with actors but anything can look cool animated.
I don’t want an anime. Cutesy anime faces and choppy motions annoy the hell out of me. I do think animation is the right medium, but not anime. I prefer the style Arcane went with or Invincible.
>Cutesy anime faces [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCFXvoJKEPM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCFXvoJKEPM) > choppy motions annoy the hell out of me. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKKm-BHJWRA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKKm-BHJWRA) Maybe don't watch trash shows?
Brother, you’re not going to convince me. I’ve never liked anime and never will.
How many anime have you ever actually watched?
Enough to know it’s not my cup of tea. I’ve tried the big name ones. AoT. Kill la Kill. Death Note. The style is cringey and I don’t like it. End of.
Check out the trailers for arcane and spider-verse That type of style would fit really well with the cosmere.
Right. That’s the style I’d choose.
All 3 of those shows have distinctive animation styles. What the hell are you talking about?
Exactly. Anime in general is not a style I like. I only picked those three because they’re easily recognizable. I didn’t want to list all the shows I’ve tried.
>Anime in general is not a style I like  Stop calling anime a Style, it's not.
“Animation style indicative or inspired by cartoons of Japanese origin, colloquially known as ‘anime’” There. Is that better?
Are you just referring to big eyes in animation or something
I'm all for animated adaptations of fantasy novels. I wanna see a malazan show
Hate it