Twilight Of The Gods Footage Reaction: Zack Snyder Was Clearly Born To Make Netflix Animation [Annecy]

Update: Netflix has unveiled a new teaser for the show, so you can see some of it in action for yourselves. Our original article continues below.

If nothing else, Zack Snyder has a distinct style. Much like Michael Bay, you can recognize a Snyder film the moment you watch it. Whether you clock his use of slow motion, his eye for striking imagery and poses, or his slick action, Snyder's background in music video directing means he knows how to craft memorable images in a short amount of time with limited resources.

This is to say, Zack Snyder was always meant to work in animation. Say what you will about his owl movie, which no one saw, but "Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole" showed this, with fantastic visuals that matched Snyder's narrative obsession with myth-making.

Now, he's getting another chance at it, with "Twilight of the Gods." This new Netflix adult animated series about Norse mythology created by Snyder, alongside Eric Carrasco and Jay Oliva (the phenomenal Netflix series "Trese," the recent "Ark: The Animated Series"), follows Leif, a mortal king who falls in love with Sigrid the warrior. After they are attacked by Thor on their wedding night, they embark on a quest for bloody vengeance against all gods.

During the Annecy Animation Film Festival, Netflix held a presentation of its upcoming animated titles, and audiences got to see two scenes from "Twilight of the Gods." We also got to watch the first trailer, which teased an action-packed treat for fans of Norse mythology while playing to Snyder's greatest visual strengths. 

The first scene had Leif, Sigrid, and their followers asking the Vanir gods for help, begging them for aid in their fight against Asgard. Jay Oliva talked about the visual style of the show being inspired by Eyvind Earle's work on "Sleeping Beauty," with the contrast between beautiful fantasy and gnarly combat being key to the show.

We previously gushed about how good this show looks when footage screened at a special Netflix Animation event, and it is in no small part due to its art style. Xilam Animation, the French studio behind the Oscar-nominated film "I Lost My Body," produces the animation, and it manageed to create a really cool contrast between the fantastical and almost delicate look of the series' world and characters and the utterly bloody and violent action that permeates throughout the show.

The second clip shown to audiences at Annecy gave us an even better look at the action in the series. We saw Leif and his group fight a massive dragon, the movements looking fluid while the camera glides around to give a sense of place. More than anything, the use of Snyderisms like slow motion, saturated colors, and slick character movements work wonderfully here; they really feel at home in a medium where a good keyframe can sometimes speak better than entire sequences — a medium where, often due to limited resources, productions have to rely on a single still image having striking iconography to be memorable. And say what you will about Snyder, but the man knows how to craft memorable iconography.

During the presentation, Snyder talked about animation being the purest form of filmmaking, seeing as the creators' very first images and ideas can make it to the screen unfiltered rather than being reinterpreted over and over by every department throughout the many stages of development. He also talked about the move from live-action to animation not being that difficult for him since he always heavily storyboards his movies (and storyboarding is a crucial part of animation). With his years of collaboration with Oliva on projects like "Man of Steel" and "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," it wasn't much of a leap to make an animated show look and feel like a Zack Snyder joint.

"Twilight of the Gods" arrives on Netflix on September 19, 2024.