This Week in Anime

The Wheel of Anime Adaptations

Chris
As we talked about last week, the anime industry increasingly seems to be headed in a more Hollywood direction, rebooting and reiterating old material rather than mining for anything new. Original IPs have always been a hard sell to the public compared to beloved legacy releases, but when you're rebooting Anne of Green Gables, it seems something's more up than usual.

That said, I don't know if I 100% agree with you that anime (and art in general) is out of adaptation options just yet. But hey, that sort of discussion is exactly what a collab-style column like TWIA is for, and I didn't get to have any arguments with my family over Thanksgiving, so I'll hear you out on this one. We might even uncover various other pools anime could pull from along the way.

It's true! Anime as we know it effectively springboarded off of adaptations of great manga by the likes of Osamu Tezuka and that's continued through today. Your invocation of the big shonen tentpoles is salient. Something like Science SARU's adaptation of DAN DA DAN is an incredible animated work on its own, but the hype it built up before the anime even premiered wouldn't have been there had it not already been a great manga.

It's one reason it seems there's so much constant pressure to find "The Next Big Shonen Jump Manga"...since that could very well be the next big Shonen Jump anime as well.

Yeah, we didn't start getting Shonen Jump in the U.S. until 2002, and then it was a far cry from the fully caught-up simulpub schedule we enjoy from VIZ today. As a viewer at the time, there was an understanding that shows like Dragon Ball Z and Yu-Yu Hakusho were based on comic source material, but watching the anime was generally the easier, more economical way to engage with the material.

If things have changed, it's not just because of more manga being overwhelmingly available nowadays, but also because that lets us get deeper into our fandom of the material and have more awareness of it overall—to say nothing of it being our, you know, jobs. So now I can be properly excited when it looks like production has finally started on the anime adaptation of my beloved Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games.

It's funny because novel adaptations have been powerhouses of anime culture for ages, with stuff like Slayers being formative, fondly remembered hits. Series like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Spice and Wolf were big breakouts from the era where I really started engaging with anime fandom. So, it is disappointing that these days, the medium is often associated with isekai shovelware.

That firehose of adapting all those world-traveling works is real. And even as I'll be eternally exhausted by isekai, the seemingly never-ending pipeline of that material that publishers churn out ready to be turned into anime indicates that we're a long way off from running out of source material. Though I'll admit that the fact that they're also rebooting novel-based series like the aforementioned Spice and Wolf doesn't exactly speak to the buffet being endless. There is a limit, and when we bump up against it, they bring Holo out again.

I don't know that that's necessarily a bad thing.

Exactly. Readapting old series isn't necessarily a sign of studios running out of creative juice or needing to place a safe bet. Studio Orange's Trigun Stampede feels like the work of artists who really wanted to put their own stamp on a classic.

To parlay that back into the topic of adaptational smorgasbords, you can get this same feeling across many of those popular shonen anime. Sure, series like Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen increasingly feel like glitzed-up promotions for the manga properties. But that means things stand out even more when you get stuff like the Chainsaw Man and DAN DA DAN anime, which try something more transformative.

Yeah, and Shinichiro Watanabe has yet another original anime project in the pipeline, with Lazarus happening next year.

This is just one anime, sure, but it indicates that the anime industry is still far from running out of ideas. It's even partially propelled by the Western side in Toonami, so there's at least a little more parallel with those original one-shots VIZ might be eyeing at licensing out for anime options.

I mean, technically, any adaptations of those VIZ Originals One-Shots would also be "anime adaptations of Western IP," but I understand the implied distinction. But even those aren't a new trend, as Western stories have found their way into anime for decades, from the recurring refrain of Anne of Green Gables to formative sci-fi classics like Lensman and Starship Troopers, to my beloved bizarre case that is Deltora Quest.

Stuff like manga and light novels may still rule as anime source material, but the creatives behind these shows have always looked to find cool stories wherever they could. It's just probably easier to get a Suicide Squad anime made now when you've got a WB willing to throw a ton of money at a project because someone told David Zaslav that something with "isekai" in the title would make the line go up.

Some people might be unaware of just how hard visual novel adaptations ruled the 2000s. They were basically like the light novel adaptations of their time!

I could definitely see critics grousing about the seasonal shoveling out of another bowdlerized dating sim adaptation filling out space in a schedule the same way we do about isekai light-novel anime today. As indicated by Gnosia up there, visual novel adaptations are still happening to this day, so even with those, the anime industry has hardly run through its supply yet.

Fate is another one that's still seeing new releases to this day, and it and Pokémon point towards the existence of more perpetual adaptations, of video game franchises or otherwise.

That is, there are plenty of series that started getting anime adaptations and still haven't stopped. One Piece is still ongoing, of course, but they're also still animating new episodes of Bleach in the year of our lord 2024! The new Dragon Ball is on television! It speaks to the staying power of those titanic shonen franchises, of course. But for fans of said franchises, getting new, continual updates of these series, rather than rehashed reboots, probably still feels pretty fresh.

To be sure, there is still Too Much Anime coming out, and the churn and crunch of that production pipeline would need to be its own separate topic. But as far as what-all is being made, I think it's nice to know that even among the veritable Aggro Crag of isekai light novel adaptations or cynical reboots of classics, there's still room for something like, say, a crowdfunded anime-original passion project like Mecha-Ude.

There are a lot of problems in the anime industry right now, but this is why I don't think "running out of ideas" is one of them.

I don't know how you score this kind of discourse by official debate team metrics, but being reassured about the potential of anime adaptation options seems like a win in my book.