Oddworld Forums - Oddworld without Lorne Lanning?

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- - Oddworld without Lorne Lanning? (http://www.oddworldforums.net/showthread.php?t=22094)

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Have you seen it? It's just the FMVs from AE with a half-arsed framing introductory scene, with no coherent flow or tone. It really doesn't work as a stand-alone film.

Twelve year old me was so disappointed when he first saw this.

Ok Nate, I didn't know. But the Abe you described is totally different from the games, so what about the canon ?

Varrok was fooling around.

It's one of the rare cases when I was 100% serious. There's an AE movie. I watched it, yes. It wasn't good, yes. I wasn't dissapointed because I didn't know there's an AE movie till I stumbled upon it on the internet. I had no hype to lose.

So are you saying that OWI couldn't make a good movie ?

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I'm not a big reader of science fiction—I dabble in the genre, but it's more of a guilty pleasure than anything else—so I've yet to encounter a book that included a purely alien cast. There's been alien creatures, such as in Saga of the Seven Suns, and in Asher's Polity novels, but I don't ever recall a core alien character, at least from my library. Humans are usually the focus, and rightly so, but I have every faith that it could be done. If Dante could take us to hell, heaven and what comes between, and if Tolkien could whisk us away to the world on the other side of ours, there's nothing stopping a talented author from taking us to an odd world far away.

The lack of a visual element is hardly detrimental anyway. Authors are authors because they can express a vision via language, a fair portion of them anyway. A good author can describe the indescribable, and the reader's imagination fills in the blanks. Regardless, as I've already said, including auxiliary drawings of Oddworld's people, places and things—such as Brandon Sanderson included within The Stormlight Archive—would solve any issues of perceptibility.

The key point is that Dante had a human protagonist exploring Hell, and Tolkien had a variety of characters and cultures in his stories they were all very comparable to humans and human cultures. The least comparable creatures are always the antagonist, and aren’t explored thoroughly because their difference is what makes them effective antagonists.

If your story hinges on understanding an alien culture it makes more sense revealing that to your audience in ways that they find easier to process and understand. A short video clip of a living creature in motion conveys information about it far more effectively than a text summary.

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EDIT: I'd just like to emphasise that if you prefer a visual story to a literary one, that's fine, I'm not trying to attack anyone's preferences, merely trying to stress that a novel could definitely work with the right author and artist combination.

I’d honestly prefer a visual story and I think that’s what Oddworld is best-suited to. The vast majority of the creatures and environments in any Oddworld story would be much better conveyed in visual form than in text. I’m not saying a novel couldn’t work, but it’s not the best way to convey those stories.

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Ok Nate, I didn't know. But the Abe you described is totally different from the games, so what about the canon ?

Who says there needs to be one canon?

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So are you saying that OWI couldn't make a good movie ?

OWI is like a few people now, so I guess they can't without outsourcing most of the stuff.

And we know how good they're at outsourcing things, MO PC

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Who says there needs to be one canon?

I don't understand. I mean, isn't Oddworld supposed to be one cohesive universe ? Furthermore, it might confuse the people.

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I don't understand. I mean, isn't Oddworld supposed to be one cohesive universe ? Furthermore, it might confuse the people.

Lord of the Rings has the books, and the movies based on the books. They are separate canons, based on the same universe.

Similarly, Oddworld could have a series of games and a series of movies, telling the same/similar stories based on the same universe but with different canons. No one has ever said that every piece of media based on Oddworld must conform to the same canon or universe.

Well, about Lord of the Rings : the real canon are the books (the things who are made by Tolkien). You are talking about book's adaptation.

In Lanning's mind, I suppose the Oddworld movies could be the real canon (if Abe is more complex and totally different from the games).

There’s no such thing as a ‘real canon’, just the canon you as the audience prefer.

Relativism must be overcome. Moreover, that's why some of you are skeptical about Oddworld games or movies without Lanning (who defines Oddworld).

"Relativism must be overcome" is probably the most pretentious sentence I've ever read. And I did Philosophy in 12th grade.

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If your story hinges on understanding an alien culture it makes more sense revealing that to your audience in ways that they find easier to process and understand. A short video clip of a living creature in motion conveys information about it far more effectively than a text summary.

I disagree. Thinking about this subject, Watership Down was able to convey a world from the perspective of rabbits very effectively, and while they're a far cry from aliens, their culture is not inherently human, even if it draws many parallels.

You mentioned Lord of the Rings as including different species of human-like characters, well I'd argue that Oddworld's species, at least the core group of them (muds, gluks, etc) are easily comparable to human cultures, perhaps more so than Tolkien, at least in a modern sense. Abe was created to be the most humanoid character for that purpose, so he was relatable to the audience, and Oddworld's cultures are merely archetypical of our own.

With that being said, I would still be more than ecstatic seeing a fully-fledged movie of Oddworld in the same style as the original FMVs.

On the subject of 'real canon' though, you're the first person I've seen online who actually understands the concept of a relative canon, Manco. Kudos.

I respect Lanning for his past work on Abe's Oddysee/Exoddus but I don't think that his artistic involvement in upcoming Oddworld projects is absolutely necessary. The quality is what matters, not names. If he's still able to deliver a fresh and at least distantly original view on Oddworld universe without excessive citation of past works - that's good. If it's not the case it may better to let others try and do it or put Oddworld theme aside and try something else, something new, something that doesn't have artistically-constraining 'weight' of an established piece of intellectual property.

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I didn't know about this version. Interesting!

Here.

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Ok Nate, I didn't know. But the Abe you described is totally different from the games, so what about the canon ?

I think that if the films were to occur, we'd have to accept that there are multiple canons in the Oddworld universe.

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I don't understand. I mean, isn't Oddworld supposed to be one cohesive universe ? Furthermore, it might confuse the people.

I think a good comparison would be the Marvel universe - there's a movie/live-action TV universe, several comic book universes, and an animated TV show universe. The same stories have been told in several, with a number of subtle and not-so-subtle differences. But each one is (retcons aside) a cohesive universe.

OK, Nate. But do you think the comparison with the Marvel universe is good ? I don't think so, because : 1. The original creator of the character(s) is dead. 2 - It's changing a lot to fit with our time.

It's strange because some of you don't accept the idea of Oddworld without Lanning (but at the same time, it's not a big deal for other series). Two weights, two measures ?

nopenopenopenope

ignore this post please

Don't put spacebar before exclamation marks, question marks, colons, etc.
It's not correct.

Not trying to be mean.

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As far as I can tell, Stan Lee is credited as the creator of the Marvel universe, and he’s still alive. Your second point is very vague, but Oddworld as a series isn’t nearly as old as Marvel and thus hasn’t yet needed to change as much to stay relevant.

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Marvel has a lot of writers and will continue after Stan Lee's death. Marvel universe is supposed to be set in our world (for example, Spiderman isn't in the sixties anymore) unlike Oddworld.

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Don't put spacebar before exclamation marks, question marks, colons, etc.
It's not correct.

Not trying to be mean.

He's French. They do that in French for some reason.

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None of that was my point. What I was saying is that the games and films would be set in different canon. Just like the comics and the films are in different canon. Because they have to be.