Hollywood’s shitty live-action anime adaptations are stealing attention from Japan’s own shitty live-action anime adaptations. They’re taking shitty movie making jobs away from Japan’s native shitty movie makers. Japanese kids are seeing all these shitty movies made by foreigners and wondering if they can even dream of making shitty movies themselves.
Hollywood doesn’t respect Japan’s tried and true formula for making shitty live-action anime adaptations:
- Leech off a title that’s already massively popular.
- Spend 90% of the budget on costumes.
- Make ads that’ll get potential viewers thinking, “These movies are usually awful, but the costumes are so fucking good, maybe it’ll actually be watchable this time!”
- ???
- Profit.
Instead, Hollywood makes movies where everyone looks stupid AND the movie sucks. The SJWs are right. Hollywood shouldn’t appropriate Japanese culture. Leave the shitty movies to Japan.
So basically you don’t like the costumes.
Yeah, pretty much.
I think Kimi Ni Todoke is the only good anime live-action movie that I have ever seen. I have also considered watching Usagi Drop since I really enjoyed the anime. I’m also curious about the new Fullmetal Alchemist movie. I feel like it’s my duty to watch it and suffer trough it just because of how huge fan I am of the original manga and Brotherhood.
I mean I knew that Dragonball Evolution was going to suck (the question was how much) and yet I still watched it just because of my love for the original manga. That’s what real fans do. We watch even the shitty live-action movies because we are kind of stupid that way.
I could see a live-action romance film being ok, if only because it condenses an otherwise dragged-out story.
FMA is in theaters here now. I could watch it, but there’s a good chance it’ll show on my next flight back to America. That’s how I end up watching most of these movies.
It’s much simpler than that in my opinion: Lets just not make anime adaptions. The whole reason why many of the narratives in anime work is because they are not bound by the constrains of our perception of the surrounding and realistic universe. Both from a narrative and from a visual perspective anime often shows things that are impossible to take seriously or to accept in a live action film. It is a different medium for a reason. In my opinion Japanese and American live action adaptions have two very different problems when adopting anime, though both result from misunderstanding one simple fact.
Japanese are too busy recreating as faithfully as possible the narrative, the aesthetics, the sound, the mood and even the scenes from the anime they are adapting while ignoring the fact that a movie is fundamentally different – and so they create a very faithful adaption at a first glance that doesn’t work at all as a live action movie and would please only the most hardcore fans, to whom the studio caters in the first place.
The Americans on the other hand are the opposite. They understand very well they have much much less of a dedicated fan base to cater to, and expect much larger financial gain from a wider audience. To achieve that they strip the adopted material of everything unique both to that show in particular, the medium of anime and Japanese culture – making a generic American movie related to the original material in name only and rehashing old and tested Hollywood narrative formulas which we have seen a million times. In this case the resulting movie, in rare cases where the director actually cares and isn’t total hack, can actually be quite good – but what is the point of creating your own story loosely inspired by a wiki summary of an anime and sticking the name of that anime on your creation which is virtually unrecognizable as an adaption?
Both problems result from misunderstand that in most cases different narratives had a good reason to have manifested their mediums in the first place. Not everything works in live action and not everything works in animation. Adapting one into the other is rather pointless – as in most cases it work well unless significance changes are made, making the “adaption” unrecognizable.
TL;DR: Anime live action adaptions don’t work and are pointless; it can only result in either infamously bizarre movies which try as hard as possible preserve everything about the original while failing to see it does not work in live action cinema like most of the Japanese live action adaptions or Changing everything about the original to better fit the live action medium, making it a completely different product that cannot be called an adaption and is just attempting to attract attention with the originals name like most of the American live action adaptions are.
Agreed.
Live action anime movies quite obviously make enough money to be profitable though
Sure, but is that a good thing? I would rather see the original works get more recognition and earn profits directly. Especially with American adaptions less money goes to the creators of the original anime and much of it goes to the creators of the live action (the studio). It’s also less likely for the profit from the live action adaptions to be invested back into anime, which what i would like to see since I really don’t care for live action.
A successful live-action adaption or even an unsuccessful one is what gets the original work more recognition, right?
Like there are plenty of anime that are essential advertisements for the manga or light novel. I believe the Re:Zero light novel sales exploded after the anime finished airing.
Not doing a live adaption is obviously going to accomplish nothing.
The profit from live action adaptions isn’t going to directly go back into anime, except for licensing I stuff I guess. But it’s not like the anime industry is paying for live action right? The money is coming from somewhere else.
The key difference from manga to anime adaptations is that I’ve only seen live-action movies adapted from already popular anime. Either they’re timelessly iconic (Rurouni Kenshin, Lupin III, FMA, etc.) or they’re made shortly after the anime has achieved peak popularity (Chihayafuru, Assassination Classroom, Terraformars, etc.).
I don’t think these movies attract much new attention (no proof, just a hunch). Rather, they revive or keep attention alive. Sure, there has to be some financial spillover to the original work/creator, but I would have to assume the movies are made primarily because they’re profitable in and of themselves.
They’re raking in that in-flight entertainment dough, that’s for sure.
Holy shit Baka-Raptor !!! I completely forgot about your whole existance ! It’ll take months for me to catch up reading all those posts…oh, wait a minute, only to realize you made only 3 meaningful posts in the past 6 years or so…I guess you won’t be mad if I ignore all the other filler posts…