The Problem With Anime Adaptations

Attack on Titan. Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni. DragonBall. Three beloved anime series that many consider to be among the best. You know what else connects them? All three were adapted into live action movies, and all three (well, five, technically – “Attack on Titan” and “Higurashi” were split into two parts) of those movies were absolute garbage. “The Guyver”, “Devilman”, “Hokuto no Ken”, “Usagi Drop” and many, many, many more examples released over the years just continue to prove, over and over again, that neither Hollywood nor Japanese filmmakers have any idea how to take an anime series and adapt it into live action properly. I mean, sure, there have been a handful of successes, such as “Death Note” and “Ruroni Kenshin”, but those are very few and very far in between. And with “Ghost in the Shell”, “Akira” and the Western “Death Note” set to debut within the next few years, one has to wonder if the problem with anime adaptations will be finally resolved.

But what is the problem, anyway? Why do so many adaptations actually fail? Let’s take a closer look at a couple of examples and try to discover the reason. Right off the bat, one of the main causes for this discrepancy, in my opinion, is that many filmmakers simply don’t understand the source material that well. As fans, we all want to see as much of what we love on the big screen, but at the same time, we’re prepared to accept the fact that you can’t properly adapt a full anime series into a 2 hour movie (or even two 2-hour movies) without cutting some things out. However, what we expect to see is the essence of the story, its core. To pull an example from a different adaptation, when you go and watch an Iron Man movie, you go to see a movie about a billionaire playboy who built a high-tech suit of armor in order to fight crime – the details around that are irrelevant, but that core is essential to all movies starring Iron Man. If, all of a sudden, you went to watch Iron Man and all of a sudden you saw a medieval drama, you’d be disappointed. You might think that there’s no way this can happen, but this is exactly what happened with the Western adaptations of “Dragonball” and “Hokuto no Ken”, which completely lost the essence of what the original stories were all about and instead turned into something that was an entirely different genre.

Another great pitfall that many filmmakers fall into is making unnecessary changes. A lot of directors think that they absolutely NEED to change things around in order to leave their mark on the franchise when that’s not necessary at all. Two good examples are “Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni” and “Attack on Titan”. There are many elements in “Higurashi” which have been preserved, and prove that the filmmaker was quite familiar with the source material and was clever enough to leave easter eggs that only the most hardcore fans would get. And yet those very same hardcore fans are later disappointed by the revelation that character personalities, appearances and relationships have been completely altered for absolutely no reason whatsoever. The changes don’t help the plot along at all – in fact, many of them actually hinder it. For example, Keiichi, the relatable protagonist that’s portrayed as a level-headed, fun-loving young man in the source material who gradually grows more and more paranoid of his friends, is depicted in the movie as an absolute douchebag with a virgin moustache who doesn’t seem like he even cares about his friends to begin with, so as a result the audience has no reason to care about him or anything that happens to him.

And then there’s the adaptations with are simply unfilmable. An excellent example of that is “Gyakuten Saiban”, or “Ace Attorney”. True, it’s not based on an anime (its source material is a visual novel), but it’s close enough, so we’ll count it. On paper, this should’ve been the perfect anime adaptation – the style was nailed to a T, the story is presented very accurately, nothing of importance has been cut… So why did the movie fail? Well, it’s because it portrayed its source material a little too well. Anime and movies are different mediums. Anime (especially something as wacky as Ace Attorney is) relies heavily on exaggerations in order to get its messages across, because it’s often limited in its animation. If you need to show that a character is shocked, you can’t just have them open their eyes a little bit wider like a normal person would because nobody in the audience would catch that – you need them to go “WOAH!!!” and just have the most over the top anime reaction you can think of. Real life actors, on the other hand, are not cartoons, and as a result are capable of portraying a lot more subtlety than their drawn counterparts. They don’t need to go “WOAH!!!” when they’re shocked, they can express that through body language. So when you try to make them act like cartoons, it’s only going to seem jarring and unnatural.

As I said earlier, “Death Note” is definitely one of the examples that gets brought up a lot when discussing good anime adaptations, and with good reason, too. It absolutely nails the core of the story (a cat and mouse game between a detective and a serial killer from the perspective of the killer), it hits all the important story beats from the source material while cutting out all the fluff, and all of the changes (and I do mean ALL of them) make the story better. It’s clear that the people who worked on it have a deep appreciation for “Death Note” and didn’t just want to make a quick buck with the live action adaptation, but were genuinely trying to deliver the best movie they possibly could. And at the end of the day, that’s really all you could hope for.