5 Reasons Animated Twilight Series Is The Best Decision Creators Could Make

A few days ago, Twilight fans everywhere were stunned by the news that the Lionsgate series based on Stephenie Meyer's wildly popular book series, which has been in the rumor mill since last year, is actually set to be animated.

While consensus on such matters is impossible, and disappointed voices can be heard in the social media discussions the Lionsgate announcement has sparked, there seems to be a large portion of the franchise's fandom that believes an animated show is actually great news.

Here's why.

The source is basically a shoujo vampire manga

If you think about Stephenie Meyer's saga in terms of Japanese culture, it is very reminiscent of so-called shoujo mangas, which are comics aimed at teenage and young adult female audiences.

These mangas often focus on romantic relationships and feature supernatural characters like vampires and werewolves. And we know very well that the best way to adapt these mangas for the screen is through animation.

Animation allows to tone down the cringy parts

The Twilight universe is a difficult place to capture on screen. On the one hand, it takes place in a boring, gloomy small town. On the other hand, it has a lot of fantasy elements, and the further the story goes, the more of it needs to be shown.

To do that, a live-action adaptation has to use 3D CGI, SFX, or heavy makeup, which makes some parts of the original movies weird and famously cringy (just think of the Cullen baby). Animation has a whole different set of rules and tropes that can make things like inhumanly beautiful vampires with glowing skin look much more natural and save the new series from the embarrassments of the previous adaptation.

Animation has better techniques

To expand on the previous take, animation has a lot of techniques that are not available to live-action filmmakers. Some of the things that would benefit animation over live action are: vampires' super speed and glowing skin, crazy eye colors, werewolf transformations, dramatic change from human Bella to vampire Bella, hauntingly beautiful baby, epic supernatural battles, switching perspectives, internal monologues, and so on.

Animation makes casting a non-issue

One of the biggest concerns fans had about the new series, when they thought it would be live-action, was casting. Even with the original movies, there was a lot of controversy when it came to who would play Bella, Edward, and other major characters. And there was no way the casting for the show was going to top that of the movie franchise. At least not at first.

However, animating allows one to avoid having to deal with that. It just doesn't make sense to compare drawn and live characters, does it?

Fans have been dreaming about it for a long time

Last but not least, Twilight's greatest power is its huge, vocal fan base. The first thing the showrunners have to do is make the fans happy. And it seems that an animated series is exactly what they have been asking for for years, especially after Twilight: The Graphic Novels came out in 2010.

So all in all, we can say with some certainty that the Twilight animated series is destined to be a hit.