While it's not Game of Thrones, the Amazon production of The Wheel of Time is definitely good television. If this had hit our screens a decade ago, it would have been as impressive a debut as GoT was back then. It's lushly framed, has a deep mythology and an intriguing historical tale woven through it.
Not bad for a series based on books by a guy who was once best known as a writer of fairly mediocre Conan the Barbarian novels. I actually avoided picking up the first novel in the series because Robert Jordan's Conan work was not great. Serviceable but repetitive, rarely bringing anything new to the Hyperborian world he wrote about. To be fair, he was probably constrained by the rights holders to the character and could only slot Conan in to a cookie-cutter world.
The Wheel of Time is much bigger and Jordan does do some
pretty cool things in his own universe. It's a bit Arthurian, a bit
Tolkien, a bit Marion Zimmer Bradley and just different enough from all
of those to be his own thing.
As I've mentioned before, the books (there were over a dozen by the end) became a bit repetitive as the series dragged on, so much so that I found myself questioning if I'd already read them as I worked my way through the series. I can only assume that doing the whole massive story on television in 8 episode chunks per book (at least at first) will allow the show-runners to clip out the repetitive bits and just bring the story to glorious light. I hope.
Readers who've been here for a while might remember my obsession with the novels of Terry Goodkind. They share an era with The Wheel of Time and I still think that they're superior in terms of the writing. Sadly, Goodkind was not served well by television and the only adaptation of his work looks (to be fair, I've only seen screen shots having TOTALLY avoided the show) more Xena than Game of Thrones. Jordan has definitely fared better on that front. The Wheel of Time is technically, artistically and emotionally as far beyond the Xena era as the rebooted Battlestar Galactica was beyond its original show.
And that brings me to the reason for this post.
Accompanying the main series is a six episode animated "The Wheel of Time: Origins" series. Each one is only about three minutes long, giving a little back story to various elements of the series. If you've read the books, there's nothing new here but they are worth the time to watch anyhow. They're BEAUTIFUL.
The animation is obviously computer generated, probably with motion capture actors. Standard stuff. What's absolutely NOT standard is that they've washed the whole thing with filters that make it look like you're watching a living painting.
This isn't really new. I've seen similar effects before, often as an effect in one of those lush opening sequences that are so popular on high end cable shows like The Wheel of Time. The folks that did this all too brief animated series have really taken this to a new level. The whole series looks like every frame was animated and then hand painted over. It's bloody impressive.
Back in the dim recesses of my past when I was reading those Jordan Conan novels, I had this notion that it'd be very cool if someone could figure out a way to animate the amazing art of Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo that graced so many Conan novels. I kept hoping to see something like it and have always, always been disappointed.
Imagine either of these (or hundreds of other Vallejo or Frazetta scenes) animated with smooth, fluid animation. I think I would cry.
Maybe one day soon I might get to see something approaching that vision of swords and sorcery animation that's been swimming around in my head all these years. The Wheel of Time: Origins just brought me a step closer.
I will say I wouldn't mind if the next step uses a slightly brighter colour palette...
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