Forum - View topic

NEWS: Live-Action Ghost in the Shell Writer Discusses Film

Live action anime adaptations have failed miserably time and time again. (You could say the same for ALL live action adaptations of animated material)

The reason is that they're redundant.

Quote:

The reason is that they're redundant.

Why? Because they've already been adapted? Stand Alone Complex laughs in the face of this comment.

They already made a Ghost in the Shell movie. It's called The Matrix.

I think that's the point - this film is already redundant just because its source material has been adapted twice already, with different spins put on it each time. And of course they're not going to adapt the manga straight up, because it's all over the place, they'd have to hand out a little time-stamped packet to everyone who went to see it with the sidebar notes as they applied to the film, and the Oshii films are probably the best known adaptation of GitS here in the states, so they're going to want to keep some of what he put into it and avoid alienating people who saw those movies years ago and might be interested enough to want to see this new movie.

So basically this leaves us with the question, "Just what are they going to do with this movie to make it something new that would actually sell well and yet possibly appeal to existing fans already?" I'm not saying it can't be done, but given what I know of American cinema, not to mention the people involved in this project already, I'm extremely skeptical.

Romuska wrote:

They already made a Ghost in the Shell movie. It's called The Matrix.

No, it's called "Blade Runner"

So you're saying that SAC was okay because it put a new spin on it and the movie will not do this. That makes no sense. If SAC, an anime directed at the same fanbase, was willing to put their own spin on it why on earth is a Hollywood adaptation which will primarily have to attract non-fans be more likely to be redundant. It seems downright crazy to me to say that a Hollywood adaptation is going to be so close to the movie that it's going to be redundant. If anything it's the other end of the spectrum, excessive changes that's concerning.

What I'm saying is that the spin SAC put on the manga, which seems to be the direction this new movie is headed as well, from what's been said about it so far

My overarching argument is that you've got basically every watchable part of the "what can we do with Ghost in the Shell?" spectrum covered already by the manga and the animation

I'd rather see the former, but as you said, it's unlikely that they'd put the money into remaking something that's had more than a fair shot at succeeding on a broad scale already.

Very little has been said so far. Nowhere even close to enough to formulate a real idea of what it will be like.

So now adapting manga is redundant? The thousands of anime that stick close the the source manga would beg to differ.

In any case, you're being way overly simplistic. There are numerous different directions such a project could go in. Boiling to down to 'either the Oshii way or the SAC way' is ridiculous.

However, the majority of movie goers do not fall into this niche. Hence the whole reason they're doing a live-action adaptation.

I'm just going based on the "lots of action" and "some of the elements from the Oshii films" quotes. If that isn't SAC in a nutshell, it's something very close to it.

Isn't the whole point of an adaptation to take the source material and somehow refine it for a different medium?

The majority of moviegoers thought that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was worth spending money on. Make of that what you will.

Come on, that's crazy. You've just spend all this time telling me how different SAC is and now you're saying that it's just the Oshii films + action?

I think though if you're going to say this, you'd also have to concede that an anime adaptation is way more likely to be an exact copy than a Hollywood one.

They were pretty wild for the Dark Knight as well.

As I've said before, there's just no way they can sell Ghost in the Shell as it was originally written to the general American movie-going public. Either it's going to do horribly or they're going to knock out the thinking parts and boob and violence it up.

I'm betting on the latter.