We are very happy to be spotlighting the work of WarlockTheVigilante, a British artist and animator, who has been working on his own fan-made Metroid anime since early 2016, receiving praise from Metroid fans on social media after he uploaded parts of his project there. Now, in October 2019, we are proud to highlight Warlock and his project to our readers, so that even more people can check out his work. Warlock shares his inspirations, his origins of becoming an animation and his love for Metroid.
WarlockTheVigilante
Hey there. I’m WarlockTheVigilante. I’m a British artist and animator. I’ve been working on a fan-made Metroid anime for three and a half years. I became a huge anime fan at an early age back in the 90s and I’ve always had a strong fascination with 80s Japanese animation. People who watch my animation may notice I love my fan-made animations to have a lot of fluidity and detail. As a kid, I always loved to draw things on paper, even when I grew into an adult I always had that hobby. I would do my own fan-made Manga comics on paper with pencil and black ink. I love to invent cool looking characters by drawing them by hand and scanning the images into my laptop to colour them in PhotoShop.
In my very late 20s back in 2012 was when my fascination in animation began. My first attempt of a fan-made animation was a film called “Lethal Alliance” which was meant to be a follow up to a manga I made back in 2010. I animated this by hand drawing the movements, inking the lines with black ink and scanning the images with a PC scanner to be coloured in Photoshop. Unfortunately, I abandoned that project and started working on Metroid instead and I’ve been doing Metroid animations since. Metroid was one of my favourite Nintendo games back in the day. I remember thinking how awesome it would be to animate Metroid.
I began uploading my Metroid animation on Twitter and the responses I got over the years were extremely positive. People were saying how amazing and very detailed it looked. How it reminded them of a 80’s cartoon when they watched it. I also shared my work with other fans of Metroid and they were quite blown away by my work. Hopefully once the Metroid anime I’m making is done, my next project will be a Star Fox fan-made anime. I can see that being a huge thing.
Our Thoughts
WarlockTheVigilante’s artstyle indeed does remind me of retro animes and I feel it works very well with Metroid, being an IP born in the middle 80s. I really like that Grapple Beam animation as well as the Torizo fight. It’s always awesome to see new and different takes on the franchise’s representation!
Image Gallery
For more of WarlockTheVigilante’s works, please visit one of the links below: