Greetings and salutations one and all.
Doesn’t it annoy you when Hollywood gets hold of a fantastic book, but then does a piss-poor job of actually translating the flick across into a motion picture. It vexes me to no end!
The interesting thing is that it’s not only with big budget movies that grand mistakes are made.
I’ve found that in many circumstances anime fails to do a good job of making manga into a worthy transformation of the original. It’s frightening just how often manga plot, characters and even story length is twisted and watered down.
What is strange is that 3 manga that I have commented on in the past have been converted poorly from manga to anime: Berserk, Gantz and Blame.
Berserk is an epic seisen manga that has been running for absolutely forever. Its styled in a very “Dungeons & Dragons” vibe, that has a hard hitting fantasy story base. I absolutely love this manga! The characters are classic, the storyline is heavy and dark and there is no shortage of twists and turns in the plot.
Strangely enough I only got into the manga only after I watched the anime version. Look, the Berserk anime wasn’t horrible, it had its moments and definitely sucked you into the main character Guts’ world. However, when I read the manga I was shocked to find out that they had left out many of the important story segments as well as characters, not to mention that they had chopped the storyline down and left the anime series on a MAJOR cliff hanger, which is never fully resolved. I remember raising my eyebrow and wondering what the hell was going on…the whole series had been epic and then a seriously confusing ending.
I cannot understand why they chose to edit the storyline the way they did with Berserk, it was perfect the way the manga had done it to begin with. Perhaps the biggest problem was taking a manga that was already so HUGE and trying to chop it down and turn it into a series that may never continue. However, now I hear rumours that they will be making a second series, which will show us how the ending “works” and the adventures past the cataclysmic ending. I’m looking forward to seeing the series because I want to know how they merge and continue the story that they over-tweaked.
Next up we have Gantz, which is a present day science fiction based around a “wasted youth” named Kurono. This is one seriously hardcore manga! There is blood, gore, nudity and a fair deal of naughty language. Like Berserk I was first introduced to the manga through first watching the anime. The anime itself was not too bad. I loved the idea and the deceptive plot…not to mention the stark reality of the abrupt nature of the human life cycle LOL. Let’s just say it’s a series where nobody is safe….or in the end, spared!
The anime series is for the most part pretty close to the manga, however once again with the ending it falls far short of its mark…truly a manga to anime failure. Luckily the manga is still going forward and knocking my socks off. I wait with absolute desperation for the extremely high quality Gantz manga to come out. In many ways I prefer this series to Berserk….but, not quite hehe. This is another anime series that I would be interested to see continue, although they would need to do some major changes to bring it up to speed with how the manga is working at the moment.
The last manga to anime conversion that I feel I should bring up is the now legendary Blame series. This remarkably jaw dropping seinen manga series is a great mix of mind blowing artistry, complex and intelligent storyline, as well as a sort of scale that is rarely captured in the vast majority of shonen manga.
When I watched the converted anime I was absolutely appalled! Not only did they chop the entire manga down into super brief anime episodes that ran for a handful of minutes, but also the storyline was brutally scattered to the wind and lost completely. The story of Killy wandering a twisted sci-fi landscape has been ingrained in my experience through the manga. The anime taints that experience with its rushed, pushed attitude and unfortunate lack of detail.
Are you a fan of manga/anime? Do you have any series that you feel does a terrible job of living up to the original? The list is pretty extensive, I just picked the first 3 that jumped into my head….there has to be tons of manga to anime flops out there.
Duncs.
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