In the last few years there have been numerous Anime series that have captivated audiences worldwide, most notably the Shonen Jump manga titles such as Naruto, Bleach and One Piece. These successful and almost unending stories have a large following both in their native country and in the western world due to ‘scanlations’, a practice of scanning and translating manga pages or chapters for purpose of distributing over the internet. This ensures that even those that can’t read any Japanese can have read the latest chapter within hours of having it hit the shelves over in Japan.
It doesn’t come as a surprise when popular Manga titles get turned into Anime TV series. The long running Shonen titles mentioned have broken past the two-hundred episode mark, with at least one of them almost approaching the five hundred mark but these series are not one hundred percent reflective of the original material. A manga chapter in a popular magazine is released weekly and would contain an average of around fifteen to twenty pages, picking up from a cliff-hanger from the last chapter and weaving new story before again leaving it on a cliff-hanger to make sure the readers return to see the outcome. So it comes as no surprise that a TV show of a manga series would soon catch up and would have to come up with its own material in order to cover the downtime. For instance once an Anime could not carry on the main story, due to it not having been written yet, they create ‘Filler Arcs’. A storyline which doesn’t appear in the original manga and introduces new characters, villains and scenarios to that the reader would see. These ’Filler Arcs’ have a rather hit or miss success rate in some series’ and doesn’t always work, although it must be noted that these original filler arcs are approved by the manga-ka (the comic artist) because he still has control of his IP.
Other Anime adaptations of Manga sometimes alter the story without introducing a filler arc section. In the original ‘Full Metal Alchemist’ TV series that screen back in 2003 the story was unfinished by the time the anime caught up with the manga and a decision was made. Due to the nature of the series, being that it was limited to a already set number of episodes the animators and story writers re-wrote the story and created an entirely new ending along with new characters and the series suffered because of this choice. In the case of ‘Full Metal Alchemist’ the anime series is now being remade and is following the manga more closely as the manga itself is also drawing to an end.
So we’ve learned that anime adaptations from manga aren’t a smooth transition, they are either; spot on the money with series such as ‘Death Note’, idealistic working within the time or episode restraints or have enough original material ideas to create these filler arcs. So what happens when the West take a stab at adaptation?
In the minds of a lot of people they end very badly and it’s usually the case. The most recent Japanese to Western adaptation was ‘Dragonball’. While the story was rewritten for a western audience the adaptation can only claim to be inspired by the original series as it had only a few correlations between the two, but certainly not enough to make people interested in the original story and certainly not please the fans of the original. I watched the film with a couple of friends the weekend of its release and well the crowd was sparse at best. It flopped as it failed to appeal to both the fans of the original and the general public it was aiming for, yet the film isn’t ‘bad’. I judged the film based on its own story and it wasn’t as bad as many people thought. The idea however that it “raped” the story of the original is firmly planted within the fans mind as they most likely grew up with ‘Dragonball’ and its sequel ‘Dragonball Z’ which is why I believe that their judgements over the film were clouded. Granted the film isn’t fantastic either but I guess everyone was comparing to the original story and not as a whole new idea. It flopped at the box office and I doubt anyone was rushing to buy this on DVD on release day.
On the horizon we are going to see more manga adaptations for western audiences, ‘Astro Boy’ is out tomorrow (at time of writing) and what prompted this article was the change of hands of the scriptwriter for ‘Ghost in the Shell’. ‘Ghost in the shell’ is a staple for many people, it’s perhaps one of the first anime films you would of discovered in the UK during the mid to late nineties due to its circulation on the Sci-Fi channel’s anime film night, or via VHS and DVD. The scriptwriter in question is Laeta Kalogridi, who brought us ‘Tomb Raider’ and who was writing the ‘Battle Angel Alita’ adaptation before James Cameron (of Avatar and Titanic fame) took it back. My worry is that ‘Ghost in the Shell’ will end up the way the Dragonball adaptation did. Unloved and shunned. Let’s hope Dreamworks do it some justice.
