Adapting Anime

This week, the live-action adaptation of Dragonball Z is coming to theaters in the Philippines. I'm the last person on earth I'd call a fan of that long running Japanese animated show, but the merest glance at the promotional material such as the posters and theatrical trailers told me that a great many liberties had been taken with the original story.

And I wondered to myself just then if it even made sense to adapt that series, as well as several other works of anime. I guess another way to ask the question would be: does anime lend itself well to live-action adaptation? For me, the answer is a big, fat, emphatic "I'm not sure."

The adaptation of many TV series, I think, makes sense. While I wasn't a fan of Speed Racer, either the adaptation or the cartoon it was adapted from, there was, to me, definitely a logic in bringing the 1960s series to the big screen.  I can also say that I am looking forward to the CGI adaptation of Astro Boy, a TV series I followed quite extensively when I was younger, as well as the alleged Robotech adaptation that was greenlit following the success of Transformers. Most of the old anime TV shows, after all, due to their mass-market, serialized nature, sported so-so animation and generated their followings based mostly on their stories and characters rather than stunning visuals, although the odd episode would be remembered for great animation too. So bringing those to the big screen makes sense, for the most part.

But what about the sprawling, ambitious, eye-popping feature films like Akira, Ghost in the Shell or any of the works by Hayao Miyazaki, which ooze consummate artistry from their every cel? Like Disney movies, they represent hand-drawn animation at its highest form, the cartoon done to perfection. And yet, in the case of Akira, at the very least, I understand that a live-action adaptation is bubbling on the minds of some studio execs, which to me would be heresy. After all, does any Disney exec fancy adapting Beauty and the Beast, or Cinderella, in live action? Of course not. Some works of Japanese anime should be similarly sacrosanct.

Another problem adapting anime presents is the very distinctive look of its characters, who, apart from having highly exaggerated facial features, often achieved highly exaggerated facial expressions which cannot really be reflected in real life and yet which often imbue the storytelling with its distinctive flavor.  Part of me understands (though I still refuse to condone) M. Night Shyamalan's decision to cast his adapatation of the anime-inspired Avatar: The Last Airbender with white actors; no Asian/Japanese/Chinese actor could have the round eyes of an anime character; it simply isn't physiologically possible.  Of course, he could have gone for Indian actors, whose eyes are arguably often bigger than those of Caucasians, but that's a whole other can of worms. 

The point is that several visual quirks of the characters, an integral part of the anime aesthetic and mythology cannot be effectively adapted in live action. Of course, by that logic the upcoming Astro Boy is exempt as it is done in CGI rather than live action.

There are some anime that may lend themselves well to adaptation, but if Hollywood knows what's good for them, they should leave classics like Akira alone.