Master Chief Unmasked by Jaekyu

GameSpy says that Microsoft’s flagship videogame franchise Halo will soon be given an anime makeover, headed by Appleseed director Shinji Aramaki. The series of animated shorts will be called Halo Legends. I’m not a huge fan, but this makes me happy.

Microsoft is financing and overseeing production through 343 Industries, its new internal division that’s in charge of everything Halo. It’s planning to preview them on the online gaming service Xbox Live this fall and has then enlisted Warner Bros. — the game companies still need a little help from Hollywood — to release them on DVD, Blu-ray and other digital platforms in early 2010.

Aramaki is directing his own short that tell the history of the Spartans, a warrior class in the game’s fictional universe that main character Master Chief is part of. Though Halo isn’t particularly popular in Japan — most of its 27 million units sold have been in North American and Europe — Aramaki said he’s a player and was immediately interested in the possibility.

“I liked that this would be an anthology of human stories told from different characters’ perspectives,” he explained.

Frank O’Connor, creative director of 343, gave a peek at some of the other Halo Legend shorts. Studio4 C’s project, tentatively called “Origins,” is a two-parter that’s about 30 minutes long in total and tells the entire 100,000 year history of the Halo universe. Another, from Toei, is the only one outside of the official canon and pokes fun at some of the game’s characters.

Within the general anime style, the visual look of the projects differs widely.

“It’s a wildly varied genre, but anime creators do things with weapons and vehicle and technology nobody else does and that marries very well with Halo,” he explained. “It’s amazing to see some of the new stuff they’re introducing and how neatly it maps to the visual aesthetics in the Halo universe.”