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Forum - View topicDid one bad adaptation really make people lose hope?
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Animeking1108
Posts: 1244 |
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It seems that ever since Dragonball Evolution, Otaku began to lie to themselves that every single adaptation of an anime will suck, no matter what. It took just announcing Bleach for weeaboos to start sending death threats to Warner Brothers (you know, the studio that gave us The Dark Knight and Watchmen). Have people really gotten so close-minded? Why is it that people were thrilled about an Avengers movie years before it was announced, and yet we still can't accept the possibility of anime movies one day being good? Didn't we say the same thing about comic book movies back in the 90s? Every time I ask that, no one seems to touch it with a 20-foot pole.
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LUNI_TUNZ
 Posts: 809 |
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Well, look at how people reacted over the news of JC Staff adapting Little Busters, because of that one bad adaptation almost 10 years ago.
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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To be fair, JCStaff adapts light novels poorly every season so there's at least some justifiably validity to those fears when they cannot even properly get linear storytelling right, much less a non-linear and convoluted setup.
As for the anime adaptations onto the big screen, along with the necessity of having a script that doesn't suck, you'll need someone who can direct their actors properly. And as they're not going to be adapting anything that isn't action, budget really matters. You're not going to get the right kinds of shots on a paltry 30 million dollar life support. Even total pieces like Battle: LA still get more than twice that, and all of the news we've heard about Akira or Cowboy Bebop is how their budgets keep getting cut back. Akira, given that it's supposed to visually emulate Blade Runner and have 10 times the excitement and spectacle, would look like an Asylum film unless it gets some serious cash. This does worry me the most, because these films rely on decent effects if the writing and acting aren't enough. Just because a studio is involved with production means nothing, look at how any Japanese animation studio can have crap and gold, even in the same year. It's who you hire and how much you give them. People were thrilled about Avengers because both Iron Mans were awesome, Hulk was far better than the previous film, Thor was okay, and Cap'n was great. It had not only years, but multiple successful films to build up to it. It was a culmination of success and collected fandom. I'm not sure why comic book films sucked back then, maybe it was the attitude or the culture of the day. The problem now is that if they're going to adapt manga and anime properties, we don't want to see good ones in the late 20s, we want them today. |
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marie-antoinette
 Posts: 4136 Location: Ottawa, Canada |
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I think that saying this is all because Dragonball Evolution was terrible overlooks a lot of key things. The main one being that there hasn't been any Hollywood adaptation of an anime that hasn't been considered mediocre by the majority of people who say it (I am thinking of Astroboy and Speed Racer here, which I believe had their fans but overall were not big hits, IIRC).
Another issue (and take this from someone who hasn't seen any of these movies so I could be wrong) would be the fact that you have a North American adaptation of something from a different culture which, let's face it, is not Hollywood's strong point. So yeah, people are hesitant. That said, people sending death threats are also idiots. Just because we doubt that anything good will be made doesn't mean that it absolutely won't. |
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Bento-Box
 Posts: 1049 Location: Florida |
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I agree with this sentiment. I think a lot of this has to do with Hollywood trying to make foreign content fit what an American Movie Audience expects. This tends to foil what the fans want and kinda undermines the point of creating a movie based on content from another culture. I guess they think that American (and other audiences) might not understand their culture. Although, with a few lines of dialogue, it's easy to explain some things without burdening a plot or providing a history lesson in the midst of an action sequence. When you have the fans groaning and an audience that may already be cautious of seeing a movie based on an "anime" or "Japanese video game", the end result shouldn't be good. The best thing, in my opinion, is to just stick to the canon material and market it for what it is. Then, at least you know you're hooking the fans still. Loose them and you're just taking shots in the dark. I liked Speed Racer but only once I saw it in blu-ray on an LED TV. The colors!!!!! But all the kiddy montages and such were really crappy and made me feel stupid for watching and even more embarrassed to say that I enjoyed the rest of the movie. Dragonball Evolution was bad. But a good bad for me. I laughed so hard at that movie I cried. I'll never see it again. I'll certainly never recommend it to anyone. And, yes, it was a terrible adaptation. |
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jsc315
 Posts: 925 |
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Astroboy to be fair was a good kids movie with a good adaptation directed specifically a 5-10 year old audience not the anime crowd. As for Speed Racer, It had the right idea and really had the old campy anime feel. The visual style I think was right on for what they were doing sadly again it was more for a younger crowd. Mostly kids watched it and kids have no idea about what Speed Racer is or wants to know. These are movies adapted for a younger generation not for the anime fan. They took the original source material and though it would do great with kids.
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TitanXL
 Posts: 4036 |
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Comic books with little continuity and story are a lot easier to adapt than 200+ chapters of plot and story. Comic books practically reboot their continuity themselves every couple years since it's not very important to them (not to mention whenever a new writer takes over writing them will usually throw out everything everyone did before him) Not to mention all big superheroes are white males, which Hollywood loves. Most manga is about Asians, and half of them are about females. Two things Hollywood despises and will try to change. Plus they're live-action. No one wants to see a live-action One Piece or Naruto. They just won't work. Comic adaptions work best as animation. |
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marie-antoinette
Posts: 4136 Location: Ottawa, Canada |
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Well, I'm not sure that's entirely fair to the comic industry - even with the DC relaunch, some of the old continuity has been retained for some titles (admittedly this actually makes the whole thing that much more complicated but it still shows that continuity is important and probably becoming more so these days). That said, I think we're still used to having multiple continuities with our superhero stories. To step away from Avengers and look instead at Batman, we have two completely seperate film franchises, not to mention several television shows, AND the comics. While there are going to be some overlap (most of this generally when it comes to origin stories and the like), the overall continuity of each incarnation is seperate. And people have come to accept this. With other adaptations, however, this is usually not the case - most of the time, people expect to go in and see the same story. Now, some of this no doubt has to do with copyright logistics, since character rights of comic characters is typically very different from character rights in a series such as Bleach, where one person has the final say and probably would be hesistant to let some North American company come up with an alternate continuity. And so what we get is an adaptation using both characters and story yet often with changes such as those mentioned by TitanXL, which do not a great movie make in 99 out of 100 cases. The end result here is that comparing the movie adaptations of North American comic heroes to adaptations of manga/anime related stories really doesn't work. It would be much better to look at it in comparison to adaptations of novels. Many of which are terrible and face the same backlash that we've seen with the proposed Bleach or Death Note movies or similar Hollywood projects. Still, when it comes down to it, things may change when one of them actually is really good. We've definitely had some that were okay but we need to get a great adaptation and then maybe people will be more willing to take a chance. Maybe. This is the internet, after all, and for some people here complaining is pretty much their default state. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 19153 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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As someone who spent 20 years collecting comics and reading therm on a monthly basis, I can attest that this statement is only sporadically accurate. Many major comic book titles - especially Marvel titles - do, in fact, have very involved continuities which span decades. Most of the "reboots" you're referring to are either alternate-world spin-offs or alternate-world reinterpretations; the latter is the case of Marvel's Ultimate titles. Because of all these alternate-world reinterpretations, I do agree with marie-antoinette that American comic fans, unlike manga fans, have been conditioned over the years to accept multiple different takes on the same characters and so are more prone to be tolerant (to a degree) of deviations from established canon. That's why it didn't faze me when, for instance, the whole business with Phoenix was handled very differently in the second and third X-Men live-action movies than it was in the original comics. |
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LUNI_TUNZ
Posts: 809 |
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Not at all true. Hell a semi- recent edition of Amazing Spider-Man (648 or higher) fetured a reference to something that happened all the way in Amazing Spider-Man #1. |
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 10369 Location: Virginia |
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I'm not sure why anyone would want a Hollywood version of an anime or manga original. I would say that the chances of appealing to fans of the original are about nil.
Going from a simple book in English to a movie almost always disappoints readers of the book. The characters don't look right because people visualize as they read. There are always changes and deletions due to the requirements of filming and additional changes just because the director and screenwriters feel like it. When you adapt from a visual medium such as anime or manga you have the added problem that you have the look of the players already established. In many cases the original character designs don't reflect reality. Then you are jumping to an entirely different culture. U.S. studios are not going to keep Japanese names or culture references. As a result you are going to have something unacceptable to fans. I'm not saying U.S. studios can't make a good movie out of a Japanese plot and characters, but it will not look anything like the original. In any case, we still have the original, which we watched in the first place because it was animation, not live action. |
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EricJ
 Posts: 876 |
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Dragonball:Evolution was a good illustration in why the problem with adaptations isn't "fear"--
It's that the people who CAN make the US adaptations...have never heard of the shows in their lives. The Dragonball movie started way, way back when Lord of the Rings had a big epic-serial hit, and DBZ was just becoming hot on Cartoon Network. Fox execs looked at the show, thought the Raditz/Namek arc was all there was to it, and immediately proclaimed "A mighty epic IN THE SPIRIT OF LORD OF THE RINGS!!!" Okay, wanna guess that motivation? 
As pre-production went on, CN's airing rolled into the Majin Buu arc, and went on...and on...and on.... We may assume Fox abandoned their idea to start with the Raditz arc. That's a good microcosm of the problem right there: Marketers in the 90's wanted to latch onto "this Anime thing the young people are into", but their first attempt was to adapt Astro Boy, Speed Racer, and Akira....Oh, and Kimba, but you probably know what happened with that one. Now, to be honest, the Astro and Speed movies were actually pretty good (Disney's Kimba, nnnot so much)--Their only problem was small release studios for Astro, and killer May competition for Speed. (The same competition that sank Dark Shadows last week, but that one deserved it.  ) But the first glaring problem that leaps to most fans' attention is the idea of corporate suits saying "Sure I've heard of anime!--I remember Astro Boy, Speed Racer, Kimba and Akira!" Try THAT one at your next convention. And the last time they tried to adapt Sailor Moon, they weren't even aware it was Japanese.
(DB:Ev was actually a fairly good adaptation by comparison, in that it tried to grasp all of the end of the Classic series at once, twist it into a Fox/CW teen idiom to sell itself, and then tried to redevote itself and twist itself back into a relatively faithful equivalent in the rewrites after fans howled. One can't blame it for being a little confused, but at least it wasn't unrepentant.) We may see Warner looking at Whatever's Currently Popular on Adult Swim, and leaping into an adaptation of Bleach--to remind you what studio gave it to you--but that's not the same thing as a decent competent awareness of the genre. We're talking about executives who are used to measuring anime's popularity by seeing which manga books sell in the YA section of Barnes & Noble. Manga, people. YA section. Barnes & Noble. I ain't waiting up nights for a decent live-action Ranma 1/2. |
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Dhaos
Posts: 23 |
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Yes: Tsubasa Chronicle.
Why did they ever start an anime not to finish it? |
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Rukiia
 Posts: 1897 |
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Because Bee Train ruined it to the point where CLAMP disowned the Anime series and didn't want them to continue it. They should have just let Production I.G finish the series since they did an excellent job on the OVA's. |
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Dhaos
Posts: 23 |
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This is the first time I've read this, and to be honest it's what I've always believed. I got a hint of it by watching the ovas, as their story didn't fit with the tv series. So in the end they did a mess, and couldn't go on. Thank you for finally confirming what I've been thinking for months. Nevertheless, I don't have any desire to buy the manga or read it, so it'll always be for me an incomplete story... |
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