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This Week in Anime
The Weird World of Live-Action Adaptations
by Christopher Farris & Lucas DeRuyter,
Chris and Lucas explore the world of live action adaptation of anime, manga, and novel properties.
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Lucas
Chris, I would never encourage our readers to act up in the comments or anywhere else on the internet, but they probably should make a fuss over Claymore! That's WEIRD! What I just typed out makes more sense as a mad-lib than a statement of fact, but that is 100% real!
Claymore a manga series that features some creature designs ill-suited to animation, let alone a live-action production, is about to be a TV show by the same studio that brought us television shows like The King of Queens, Ghosts, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. I'd say this doesn't make much sense, but what IP gets the live-action treatment either in Japan or abroad hardly ever does!
It's an odd choice overall, to be sure, least of all because Claymore's been finished for over a decade, and while it was a Battle Angel Alita where you can expect some kind of name-recognition traction, if only from old "weaboomers" who seeing the title on the shelves at a Borders.
Note for the kids: ask your parents what Borders was. Then set aside some time to let them stop crying.
"Weaboomers" might replace "Anime Old Heads" in my brain as the go-to phraseology for Gen X and above anime fans! While Claymore might not be the heaviest hitter from when manga started getting big in the US in the 90s, it was present on those shelves. I can see a sequence of events where someone in a decision-making position at CBS was both 1) a casual reader of Claymore in their teenage years when it was more relevant, and 2) struck that very little was going on with the IP today, which probably allowed them to pick up the live-action rights on the cheap.
While that is all speculation, that's how a lot of US live-action adaptations of Japanese anime and manga seem to come about! Coop's Vicious-filled favorite, Cowboy Bebop, was super stagnant when the Netflix series was announced. The western live-action Death Note series also dropped after the franchise's peak popularity.
I'd argue that Bebop is something of an evergreen anime property here on our side of the world. Adult Swim ran those same 26 episodes for years. Not that that amount of exposure helped the people producing the show figure out what made the original good.
Still, it makes me think about Alita and how long James Cameron had that one in the oven waiting for the stars to align to let it get made. I can see a factor behind the later arrival of adaptations of once-hot properties like Bebop and Death Note being the sheer amount of time it can take to get things made in the Hollywood ecosystem. Since it only just got announced, I don't know if that's what occurred with Claymore here. Instead, it's, as you said, likely a combination of personal interest and convenience, plus some execs figuring they can produce something that might for Game of Thrones if they can get viewers to squint.
Absolutely, and while I don't mean to be cynical and focus on the monetary element of what gets turned into a live-action series first and foremost, I say with absolute certainty that any executive with a pulse in Hollywood would approve of a live-action Berserk series if they could get the rights to it, but Miura's estate continues to play hardball for whatever reason.
Now see, that has name recognition! This all brings us to a focal point of what kind of anime tends to get picked up for the live-action treatment overall. Are those parameters part of the reason the exercise so rarely works?
Right off the bat, we've mentioned some of the heavy hitters, for better or for worse: Netflix's Cowboy Bebop and Death Note, the live-action Ghost in the Shell. These are series that had a solid western fandom footprint and had the kinds of aesthetics and subject matter that could theoretically work for a mainstream audience here. Even if Death Note and GITS felt they had to de-Japan-ify their characters in the process, some in (collar-tug) less graceful ways than others.
As a firm believer in the idea that the more a story takes advantage of the affordances in a given artistic medium, the less suited it is to adaptation in another medium, I couldn't agree with you more. Bebop, GITS, and Death Note all worked well as anime, but the way those anime execute their story makes them all a poor fit for the live-action treatment. Bebop and GITS are too visually fluid to have their best elements translate well to live-action, and DN has the opposite problem of being super internal-monologue focused, which the anime makes up for with some stellar voice action.
As for any whitewashing that's occurring in these properties, that'll get a big ol' "OOF" from me! At least the live-action One Piece series understood that the multi-cultural inspirations behind the original manga are critically important to the story's themes and its broader success.
One Piece is a good one to get to in the same breath as stuff like Bebop, if only on of how opposite the input and outcome were. If Cowboy Bebop seemed ill-suited to live-action, translating the cartoon-ass qualities of One Piece to the real-world dimension would've felt like a downright impossibility.
Yet somehow the Netflix nakama pulled off a miracle, and made a live-action One Piece that worked, and has a second season on the way! We're going to see a CGI Tony Tony Chopper palling around with Iñaki Godoy, and I'm somehow excited to see that, as opposed to something like the soulless homunculus of Stitch that Disney's getting ready to trot out for their latest ill-advised anti-animation remake.
I cannot even imagine how different the writers' rooms between the live-action Cowboy Bebop and One Piece must have been! For whatever reason, the former felt like they needed to use Joss Whedon-style quips to make it hyper-approachable for western audiences and the story of Bebop more palatable. Meanwhile, the One Piece team did a deep read of the manga, made some character parallels more overt, and put out a solid TV season! It boggles the mind.
I'm picking up on another trend where live-action anime adaptations, especially the ones taken on by western studios, tend to be fantasy stories, or at least fall into the broader action-adventure descriptor. This feels misaligned to me, as there are plenty of more dramatic or interpersonal anime and manga series that could make the jump to the live-action medium way more easily than a big spectacle.
That "western studios" clarification is good, since we'd be remiss if we didn't note that there are a whole bunch of anime adaptations in the medium's home country that tackle that more grounded material. Erased, Discotek.
There are also projects like international coproduction Drops of God, an Apple TV adaptation of a manga about the rip-roaring world of wine tasting that's netted a couple of seasons.
Of course, all this buries the lede that the anime that get live-action adaptations in the west tend to be based on anime with some semblance of popularity in the west, and that tends to be action-oriented.
While a part of me wants to push back on that analysis and point out all of the popular Japanese IPs in the US that aren't traditional action fare, like Sanrio media empire, I think you're on to something. Spectacle blockbusters have dominated American media since the release of Jaws in 1975, and the more action-heavy versions of blockbusters have been safe bets for production companies since True Lies released in 1994. Americans will show up for action, and that makes action-focused anime adaptations the most appealing to decision-makers at studios.
That focus even applies when they're adapting Japanese source material that doesn't have an anime yet!
How depressing is it that Hollywood can produce more interesting light novel adaptations than a lot of the ones we get every anime season?
My little jokes aside, adapting Tom Cruise fans who showed up for these projects probably had no clue about the origins of the material!
Absolutely! While some stories are more culturally tied than others, a piece of media's strong points can usually penetrate any cultural divides and appeal to people with wholly different backgrounds. Edge of Tomorrow is a badass movie because that team made a badass movie! Not because they trimmed and tweaked arbitrary elements of the original novel to make it "work" for American audiences.
This gets into the point that apart from pulling off a visionary adaptation like One Piece (or Speed Racer, which always merits a mention in how way ahead of the curve the Wachowski sisters were), simply selecting a solid source material is the best path to success. Perhaps that lends more credence to your theory about why Claymore made the cut for this treatment: someone in the room genuinely sees some potential in it.
Not a live-action series, but if the folks over at Frederator Studios and Powerhouse Animation could turn the intentionally obtuse and lore-dense Castlevania series of video games into one of these most badass shows to come out in the past decade, anything's possible! As far as adaptations go, so long as the people making the new project see the potential in the original work and want to make something that enhances those points, the result is at least going to be interesting.
It does make me curious about how these efforts might run up against more atypical picks for anime getting this treatment. You asked about series with less physical action or supernatural supplementation, and it seems Netflix is at least going to be trying that with their own take on a Kamen Rider Gaim get owned in amusing ways.
I feel pretty strongly that any live-action take on Kakegurui isn't able to (or legally allowed) be as horny as it needs to be to capture one of the main draws of the anime, but I'd love to see BET go full Euphoria with it and have those adults playing teenagers get right up to the line on what kind of content it can get away with TV-MA rating.
Given the prominent presence of Kakegurui, its spin-offs, and adaptations on Netflix, I can at least fathom why they'd pick it for an experiment like this. Even as I wish they'd just have focused that energy on another season of Kakegurui anime instead.
Still, all that has helped us glean some insight into the seemingly arbitrary reasoning behind deciding on these adaptations. Which means we can hit the home stretch by asking the really important question: Lucas, what anime do you think makes the most sense to get this sort of live-action treatment?
We've gotten a taste of this from Japan already, but I think the world YEARNS for a big-budget, live-action JoJo's Bizarre Adventure series!
The franchise has drawn from global inspirations since its very first chapter and has only found more international success lately. With the latest part of the manga explicitly centering on socio-economic politics in the US state of Hawai'i, I think there's never been a better time for JoJo's live-action adaptation, either from a more recent part or with an original storyline. How about you???
JoJo's is a bold choice, and one I don't know that I'd have thought would be possible in an iteration like this until One Piece shut me down a couple of years ago. Anything's possible, and you're right that there's no shortage of entries natural for an American focus. Surely, some viewers would happily BET on watching a version of some of the most flamboyant horse racing ever put to page.
If they tackle part 7, I'll be happy so long as they find a way to make Gyro as dirty hot as he is in the manga!
As for me, I'll always be astounded that Gun Smith Cats never got so much as optioned for the Hollywood treatment. Its combination of detailed gunplay and car chases feels made for our screens, and it's the sort of thing where they'd be pretty free to choose between adapting the anime, manga, or just creating their own cool plot with the characters.
Maybe they just could never find an actor massive enough to play Bean Bandit.
Eventually, they'll stop making new seasons of Reacher, and then Alan Ritchson, the largest actor, can Bean up!
Gun Smith Cats is also a great pick and falls into a perfect niche of being fairly recognizable to a good number of people, but not so popular that it would have to follow the source material super closely, lest fanboys rally against it.
It is funny that, after the earlier conversation, we both still wound up picking action-oriented series as our first choices. But as we've been over, that tends to be the way the wind blows on this side of the world. We'll have to see if odder picks like Claymore and Kakegurui, as well as series like One Piece break the perceived "curse" of anime adaptations opens up a broader selection of series going forward. It'd be interesting to see not just new anime adaptations, but good ones.
For various reasons, media executives the world over are looking for new sources of inspiration. A remake of the Anne of Green Gables anime is dropping in just a few weeks! By the same token, we're going to see more western takes on eastern developed media in the years ahead, and it seems like Hollywood is finally getting the hang of these adaptations. It's all pretty exciting!
It is! I hope the people producing these shows can learn lessons from their source material like Kakegurui: Place your bets carefully, lest you go all-in and wind up drawing another Netflix Bebop.
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