Forum - View topicTimeless Classics Told Through Anime
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futuresoon
Posts: 68 |
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The anime made a lot of strange choices, least of all not having the heroine in it, but the game is actually pretty good if you're an otome fan. Which not everyone is, of course, but, well, it was never intended to appeal to anyone beyond its target audience. Certainly none of its players go into it looking for any kind of faithful adaptation. |
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belvadeer
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Seriously? What ass-backwards school district was this? |
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Princess_Irene
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 2607 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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^Northern Maine. Great food, three weeks off for the potato harvest, sent me screaming back to grad school so I could teach college.
 (I grew up in coastal Maine, which is totally different.)
EricJ2, I somehow didn't see your post about Guys Read - and you're right, the only boy heroes with Anne-levels of agency most people can come up with from classic books are Jim Hawkins and maybe Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn - and those last two have definitely been claimed by adult readers. Out of curiosity, have you read Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom series? I've heard that about Jane Yolen.
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residentgrigo
 Posts: 2421 Location: Germany |
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None of the examples are "WAY more interesting" that the literary classic they are based on. The meandering article is hard to read too. What was i expecting though.
1975´s Arabian Nights: Sinbad's Adventures may have been my first anime in the early 90s. Can´t say that it aged well. Most off these didn´t. Akage no An, Fushigi no Kuni no Alice and maybe Jungle Book Shōnen Mowgli should have stood the test of time the most. All had striking designs too. I would love to say the same about Dezaki´s Treasure Island. The characters sure look nice, but the end lost me rather quickly last year, unlike the book. It was the last anime on my bucket list too. A shame. |
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AVHodgson
 Posts: 11 Location: Rhode Island |
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The article seems to just half-heartedly mention at the end that the mid-70s through mid-90s were a prime time for anime takes on Western children's classics - this is an understatement. The meisaku trend was a big one in its day; most anime studios from those days made at least one. Nippon Animation, of course, was the reigning champion of meisaku anime; a good portion of their shows are in the genre - not just the World Masterpiece Theater shows but stuff like Maya the Bee, Sinbad, Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book...
I do agree, however, that the trend of taking the classics out of children's hands and into colleges is disheartening. The library near me still has copies of some of the great works of kids' literature in the children's section, though, so there may yet be hope. |
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belvadeer
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I had no idea a part of Maine was like that. I'm quite surprised. Well, I sympathize. We educators go through some of the roughest stuff. |
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nargun
Posts: 925 |
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Most people only deal with a carefully selected/curated segment of the population: business-to-business, your customers and your suppliers are theoretically chosen for baseline competence / reasonably-well-informed / ability-to-play-well-with-others as a minimum, and for a lot of retail your customers need those factors too to be able to avoid your product. Baseline/necessities retail, social services, and some government work: they deal with everyone. |
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Pidgeot18
 Posts: 101 |
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Yeah, I went looking to the Wikipedia page to see if there were any other political allusions other than the entire allegory-of-bimetallism-and-Bryans-and-what-have-you theory and didn't come across any in the original novel (although apparently the stage production had more... it referenced then-President Theodore Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller, not exactly obscure political references). Given that Baum seems to have the inclinations to be opposed to bimetallism and William Jennings Bryan, it seems strange that the political allegory in the story would be in support of it... 
Personally, I think the entire political allegory interpretation comes across as rather like numerology: a series of explanations that appear to mesh well together but chosen entirely because they fit a narrative, combined with a determination to say that a flower can't ever be just a flower, it must be a symbolic representation of love, or of death, or of the meaningless of arcane rituals whose purpose has long been forgotten. Also, if it takes 60 years to find the allegory, doesn't that mean that the story ought to be enjoyable even if you don't find it, independent of whether or not the allegory was intentional? |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11355 |
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One of my favorite authors when I was a kid was Jim Kjelgaard, who wrote a lot of outdoors adventure books about animals and pioneers and such (Disney made Big Red into a movie). I think they were intended for teen boys, but I discovered him around the third grade and devoured every book of his the public library had. The two I remember most was Snow Dog, about a husky gone feral, and Hi Jolly, the story of Ali al-Hajaya, aka Philip Tedro, aka Hajii Ali, who was instrumental in the US Army's aborted Camel Corps in the 1850s (and why there are still feral camels in the Southwest to this day). My first introduction to the existence of Islam.
Those books inspired 4th-grade me to write a long poem about a wolf pack taking down a moose. I pulled no punches.  It was as trite and cliche as you'd expect from a kid, but I think if a 4th grader wrote that now, they'd ship them off to counseling.  Maybe it says something about the times that the adults in charge of me weren't more horrified than they were (or than I was aware of?).
Basically, I read a lot of books like that (when people would talk about Viewtiful Joe, it always reminded me of Beautiful Joe, about an ugly, abused pit dog who found a good master), most of them written in the first half of the 20th c., often about the 19th c., but I'm pretty sure those have all been removed from kids access now (no doubt due at least in part to lack of reprints and the books falling apart), which is a shame. Speaking of Beautiful Joe, it actually gives a tip of the hat to Black Beauty in its opening. Are kids still allowed to read Black Beauty? Though it wasn't even intended as a kids' book, it was probably mostly read by kids. Or The Black Stallion and its many sequels? That's another one with a young boy as protagonist, but probably more read by girls.
While I'm rambling down memory lane, I'd also like to give a shout-out to Eloise Jarvis McGraw, who actually wrote 3 Oz books, Merry Go Round in Oz, The Forbidden Fountain of Oz, and The Rundelstone of Oz. One of my all-time favorite books is her Sawdust in His Shoes, about a young circus bareback-rider who ends up with a 40s (?) farm family, which I have waited my whole life for Disney to make into a live-action movie. ::sigh:: |
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Ryo Hazuki
Posts: 363 Location: Finland |
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The earliest anime version of Wizard of Oz I know is in Manga sekai mukashi banashi anthology series animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=2314&page=25 starting with second half of episode 83. It was released at least in Sweden and I remember having vague memories of seeing a Finnish dub of it as a child.
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13556 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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This reminds of how many American media companies got their start. That is, many media (specifically, Disney) get their start from using classics or the public domain, yet they lobby Congress to extend the copyright of those works.
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belvadeer
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What in the world are you going on about? |
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vanfanel
 Posts: 1242 |
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I'll still take the Nippon Animation World Masterpiece Theater version of "Little Women" over any live-action version I've seen. It only adapts the first half, and we do lose a lot of drama that way, BUT: both film versions I've seen have Jo being criticized at the end for spoiler[writing gothic romances. In the end, it feels like she earns Professor Baher's love by writing the kind of fiction he wants to read instead of what she enjoys. And as a fan and writer of genre fiction, this hacks me off.
In the book, however, she's writing true crime, and in the process reading police reports, digging into the worst things that go on in the underbelly of society and popularizing it as entertainment. Professor Baer doesn't even know she's the author at first; he just talks about how that kind of thing is harmful to society, and has a bad effect on the author as well. His argument isn't a matter of taste; it's an issue of morality. One Jo finds herself agreeing with once she thinks about it.] |
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Poppun-chan
Posts: 4 |
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Well this is good timing, I just finished watching one such series which I really loved: Kashi No Ki Mokku....Or at least Saban's dub of it "Pinocchio the series" (Unfortunately there's no full release of the Japanese version)
I will admit, it is a bit more dark than other adaptions of Pinocchio, but I found it much kinder than a number of other 70s anime (if nothing else Pinocchio/Mokku can't normally feel physical pain) and a really nice surprise. One thing that's interesting is that the show isn't a strait up adaption of the story, but you can tell some episodes were inspired by the original (including moments that don't always make it in, like the part where he's tricked into planting a gold coin) and series does a good job of capturing the spirit of the story while making it it's own. Some scenarios are a bit odd, like the time he turns into a tree, but others feel like a lot of thought was put into what it's like to be a wooden eight year old; there are times when he has doubts about whether he wants to be human after all, time where he tries to pass himself off as a human, even one where he gets termite damage (not as a humour moment either) Mokku himself is likable and fun; fundamentally he's a good person but he doesn't fully understand what's right or wrong and why and sometimes he makes really big mistakes because of that (like the infamous 5th episode) or needs to be pushed in the right direction, but he learns over the course of the show even if he backslides every so often. Sometimes he gets frustrated with how he is and lashes out, or does things just because it's fun without thinking of the impact it will have on others, and sometimes he's trying to stop others from doing the same, so to me her never felt too far on either extreme. Plus the parent and child relationship between him and both Geppetto and the Oak Fairy are adorable; he ends up in danger in almost every single one of the first dozen episodes, but it's worth everything he has to go through when you see him reunited with his father and they're just happy to see each other again. I'm sorry if I've rambled a bit, but I really ended up loving this series (and I'm hoping either Discotek will release it like they did with "Oz" or that one company in Japan that's releasing HD remasters of retro shows gets to it soon) |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11355 |
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It can't be as dark as A Tree of Palme, which is basically Pinocchio on acid (spoiler[he kills Bambi!!  ]).
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