This Week in Anime

The Weird World of Live-Action Adaptations

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 CBS Studios of all production companies making a live-action version of 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!

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Yu-Gi-Oh, Hamtaro, and the entire 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.

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.

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.

Oh man, BET is going to be such a weird project and I'm so curious to see how it plays out!

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.

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???

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!

Eventually, they'll stop making new seasons of Reacher, and then Alan Ritchson, the largest actor, can Bean up!

Gunsmith 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.

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!