Booooo!!!!
I think the show is aided so much by the acting (not just voices) of Thomas Jane, Wes Chatham, Shohreh Aghdashloo, David Strathairn, Jared Harris, and Cara Gee. If it was animated, it just wouldn't be the same.
It's so good. They obviously had to consolidate some characters. But, there are some excellent casting choices. And, the actors that start off unevenly improve as the series goes on. It's my all-time favorite sci-fi show.
There are exceptions, but these exceptions are for relatively hard speculative fiction. THE MARTIAN was perfectly suited to a live action adaptation precisely b/c it was intentionally very close to reality.
Good epic speculative fiction movies tend to be from relatively hard / low-magic novels.
In particular, there was a great deal more restraint and discipline than typical in modern works in the speculative elements used for THE LORD OF THE RINGS, DUNE, DRACULA, and other speculative fiction works that, in addition to being great on their own, spawned great live action adaptations.
I should say "contemporary" instead of "modern".
But the point is--the deviations from reality in the most hugely influential pioneering works in various genres of speculative fiction tend to be much smaller b/c audiences weren't already acclimated to a wide variety of 'magic' tropes.
Yeah. Though more 'mythic' things from the period like the substories in the Silmarilion or Lord Dunsany just cry out for an animated adaptation, because the inevitable stylisation gives you more freedom in depicting both heroic action and extreme emotion (and in Dunsany's case, wry irony).
I think the animated over live action could provide a solution other than cgi for fantasy. I remember seeing it in Legion for psychic combat and it looked sick.
One thing I respect about DC - they've kept making cartoons out of their cartoons. (We'll just gloss over the fact that the live action movies they *have* done are mostly eyes-filled-with-molten-gold level horrible.)
