The Locked Tomb Adaptation Must Be Live Action

I love animation as much as the next bitch. I love how versatile it is, how fantastical, I love art that pushes the medium or tries to break out of Hollywood's preconception of what a cartoon must be (kids' show or adult sitcom). My TV fandoms are overwhelmingly animated; there are exceptions, but in general I'm just not much for live action.

However.

It is really important to me that when the Locked Tomb series is inevitably adapted into a five-part film franchise, it is not animated. There multiple reasons for this!

One, TLT does this thing where you think you're reading, like, a normal piece of built-from-scratch worldbuilding with its own totally unique and made-up history: necromancy is real and space travel is easy! And then at some point, even before the big lore drops, you start to wonder…wait, is the first house Earth? Are the characters actually speaking English for real? Are the memes diegetically memes? So while normally I think that a fantastical setting is (by default) best portrayed with animation, TLT Is an exception: attaching the characters to flesh and blood bodies will help to convey, early on, that subtle but important sense of "this world is more familiar to you than you think it is."

Two, given all the possession and body swapping that happens in this series, it will be fun to see multiple different actors' takes on the same characters. (One actor will play Harrow, Gideon, and Nona at various points in the story. Another will play Camilla, Palamedes, and Paul. Judith and Varun. Cytherea and Wake. Naberius, Ianthe, and Palamedes.) While animation is of course capable of playing in this space, such play only extends to voice acting (and sometimes not even that! shame on the coward's move of switching voices along with bodies!), with all body language changes the domain of artists and animators—which is fine, like, I'm sure storyboarders could do a great job with it and make a good art. But it will a lot more fun for me, a viewer, to witness actors flex their chops in full physicality as they adopt each others' characters.

Which ties into three, the most utterly crucial reason that TLT on the big screen must be live action: respect for the source material demands that these movies be CAMPY as FUCK. I want to see the actors enjoying themselves! I want the special effects to be really cheap and awful! If an adaptation doesn't respect how insane and ridiculous the books are—if they do not earnestly engage with the fundamentally silliness of their premises, like for example the Catholic juggalo death cultist protag who heretically worships a barbie doll—then I want no part of it.