A few months ago, I walked into a local coffee shop wearing a hoodie featuring the eyes of beloved ‘90s anime fox boy Kurama from Yu Yu Hakusho. The barista there seemed legitimately excited to recognize him, as he had just finished the anime for the first time. We talked a bit about the creator’s (Yoshihiro Togashi) other projects, and then I mentioned that there was a live-action adaptation coming to Netflix in the near future. He shrugged, “I’m not really interested in that,” and we kept talking. As I left, I thought about my own trepidations towards the show. I had to watch it, but also expected disappointment from it. When it finally came out, I saw 66 episodes of an anime I love condensed into a five-episode, spiritless train-wreck, offering all the original’s most iconic moments but devoid of substance. I didn’t enjoy it, but I was not surprised.
The sentiment of not enjoying or even actively disliking live-action adaptations is easy to come across. Whether in person or online, most people I encounter seem to shy away from them, dread them, mock them. The earliest footage of Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop was demolished online, the Death Note movie a long forgotten nightmare (besides some lovely voice acting from Willem Dafoe), and most recently, the new Avatar: The Last Airbender series finds itself so deeply in the uncanny valley that it becomes off-putting and cold. Despite some wonderful performances by the actors involved, fans seem dissatisfied, and even those who do, in theory, want these adaptations find that the execution consistently falls short.
There have been movies and TV based on comics and animations for decades, but ever since the gargantuan success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, studios have been scrambling for the next frontier of IP to adapt. The temptation is great. The story is already there for you, likely with a preexisting fan base that you can count on. Fans, however, are precious about these things. They rally against seeing their favorite things deformed, twisted, mutilated into a more easily filmable product. It is frustrating to see something that moved you turned into something bad, or worse, simply unremarkable. What’s more is people are tired of seeing these things churned out endlessly as if from some giant content factory where something beloved enters and a vaguely similar schlocky mess exits.
At the heart of so many of these original animated properties is the gift of time. Attachment to characters develops because you live their lives with them. You see them on their off days, you see their smallest struggles, you see how those elements build into the grander story. It’s the small quiet moments that add gravity to the more explosive segments that comics and anime become known for. An issue with bringing these to a live-action setting is that there is just not enough time or budget to give these quiet moments their due. Modern shows are lucky if they make it to a third season, and in those all too few seasons are less and less episodes per order (Netflix’s Avatar boasts a measly eight episodes, and, as mentioned, Yu Yu Hakusho was granted a pitiful five). To write something expecting a long run is perhaps foolish, but to rush to these moments without any of the emotional groundwork behind them is to create something sterile and insubstantial. It’s the quiet that makes these properties remarkable, the loud moments are made possible by that. To cut them out shows a misunderstanding of the work being adapted in general.
We don’t take animation seriously in the West. It’s often viewed as childish and juvenile, with more adult animations needing a disclaimer explaining they are not for children. For many, something being animated is a turn-off, an indicator that they won’t engage with it at all. I think that is fine. I don’t enjoy these things to convince others they should, and my enjoyment of them is not dependent on other people acknowledging their validity. If you’re moved by them, terrific, and if you disregard them because of their medium, that’s fine too. I just don’t imagine the majority of these adaptations will convince anyone they should explore the source material, nor do they seem to find a new fanbase separate from that source material. In many instances, they feel like they have a disdain for their origins, an arrogance towards it, an idea that their job is to make it better. There’s an underlying idea that, if these properties are developed into live-action shows or movies, they’ll be somehow elevated, as if the limitations of filming and special effects and time will enhance these properties rather than becoming shallow reflections of them.
In some cases, a live-action adaptation does allow some life to be injected into a forgotten property. For example, The CW’s Riverdale, rather than doing a faithful depiction of the comics it’s based on, creates a wild and excessive world full of drama, murder, and magic. It became a new and unpredictable modern soap opera, which was lovely. It jump-started a franchise that had lost its sheen. This level of departure and energy in a remake is fairly rare though. Netflix’s One Piece captures the series’ spirit while offering new fans an entry point into the gargantuan tale, as well as giving long-time fans a way to relive the old magic in a way that feels fun and new. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman was met with praise and acclaim as well as quickly being renewed for a second season. In the case of Sandman and One Piece, we saw their respective creators (Neil Gaiman and Eiichiro Oda) working as executive producers on the shows. Oda met the One Piece cast, gave them his blessing, and spoke about his excitement publicly; Neil Gaiman co-wrote the pilot episode of Sandman. The idea of both shows was to pay homage to their original series while opening the doors to new fans. On the opposite side, we saw the creators of the original Avatar: The Last Airbender series leaving production on the adaptation citing “happiness” and “creative integrity” as their reasons for departing.
I think about “creative integrity” and how many of these remakes feel devoid of it. The cynicism of tapping every last vein of nostalgia is exhausting and disheartening. Sometimes, it feels as if studios are saying “Oh you liked that, little baby? How about another bite?” but the next bite tastes much worse, and I am not a little baby. I don’t think it’s impossible to make one of these with energy and integrity, but the landscape of content production seems to actively work against that. With that in mind, I would rather see them try something new instead of repeating something that’s already been done, each time made just a little worse than it was before.
Dave Tomaine is a comic writer and musician from Philadelphia. His cat’s name is Jasper. You can find him at @cavedomain and @FFBedtime on Twitter.
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