On Anime: Can Live-Action Adaptations Work?

Why "Speed Racer" worked while "Dragonball" probably won't.

Other anime adaptations currently in production in Hollywood are drifting further, and less promisingly, afield. The recent working draft of “Voltron” that surfaced online swapped out the original premise of a group of stranded futuristic peace keepers to one involving a post-apocalyptic wasteland and a group of robot lions kept in Mexico designed to fight metal-eating aliens. The “Robotech” script is expected to be a mash-up of the various “Macross” plots and other “Super Dimensional” series. What makes it so difficult for these franchises to cross over?

Aside from giant robots, it seems, everything. “Dragonball”’s original plot is actually a satire of “Journey to the West.” That doesn’t mean that Chow-Yun Fat gets to wear Hawaiian shirts and blow CGI-fire from his hands. And this isn’t the first time someone tried making a live-action version:

Even in Japan, adaptations can and do fail. Hiroyuki Nasu’s ill-fated 2004 take on “Devilman” — an anime/manga series from Go Nagai about demons possessing humans and the end of the world — managed to snag the top prize in the Japanese equivalent of the Razzies. Years before this fever hit, small companies made straight-to-video versions of “The Guyver” and “Fist of the North Star” in an attempt to capitalize on their underground fanbase. Both were mildly terrible — although “The Guyver” did benefit from decent creature designs and a Jeffery Combs cameo as Dr. East. “Fist”’s live-action abomination involved hair spray and managing to cast every “European” role with Asians and vice versa. And Miike’s “Yatterman” is itself as haphazard and confusing as they come, drawing upon a quarter of the show’s original child-friendly fantasy plot, with the directors own mad-cap design filling in the rest.

Anime has split: it’s both a means to move toys and merchandise and an auteur’s realm for crafting stories too broad or overtly creative to be shot with actors and sets. If there’s a lesson to take from live-action adaptations to date, it boils down to leaving the medium of animation to its’ own devices. Even comic book films know when to leave well enough alone — “The Punisher,” for instance, has failed three times, and will never be made again. For now, maybe it’s best put this way: There’s a time and place for sailor-suit girls, epic space battles with giant robots and physics-defying hair, and it probably won’t involve that kid from “The Chumscrubber.”

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