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Faithful Movies,

Henry Atkins
Apr 25, 2018
3 min read

I’m taking a short diversion from the Adaption series to talk about an odd case for Movie adaptations.

Why is it in a world of terrible Movies based off beloved Books, Comics and Video Games the planet is perfectly halved on it.

What I mean is the West have designed no end of awful adaptations in Movie but if you were to look at the East, more specifically Japan, they have movies that are practically carbon copies of the source material so long as it originates from Japan.

I’m barring that strange ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ Anime of course.

To show my point, here's a side-by-side comparison of DeathNote:

The original anime series of DeathNote was an adaptation of the Manga series. I’d say it did everything right or at least got the majority of the story across in a cinematic manner that had drawn everybody in to this classic horror series. Or at least in my opinion it grabbed me up until about two thirds in when the main Protagonist is murdered and then replaced by the sloppy seconds that either have a craving for chocolate or is perfect in every way. So, so boring.

This series got a Japanese adaption:

I’ve only watched clips and although like any adaptation of an entire season of a show into a movie, it had plenty cut out of it. However this is the strange part about this adaption. It excels visually and retains that same Anime style:

I find it baffling because in the West we sorta recently got a Netflix adaptation of DeathNote and the characters (In the same order as the gallery I just displayed) look like this:

But I digress. Although I know from experience that Japanese Anime adaptation have somewhat corny acting only on the account of it being so faithfully adapted that it does everything it could to be the same, maybe Netflix has a better approach. One with proper Western acting.

Well, recently my family are road-testing Netflix and I’ve had the chance to check out the first episode!

It’s… It’s odd that somehow they got Ryuk, whose essentially the Grim Reaper by the way, accurate but they got both the humans’ designs so far off from even an excusable and relatable srandpoint and their acting to miss the mark somehow further than firing an arrow behind you rather than at the target you’re facing.

Of course I don’t even need to bring up the West other multiple failures in other adaptations but I can at least show Gallery of Japanese adaptations to prove a point that they go above and beyond for mimicking design down to the letter:

I think there are two reasons that determine an adaptations quality.

1. The source material.

If you’re passionate enough you’ll mirror everything you’ll see in the original (Like Japan) but with that means it’ll look strange to the untrained eye and stand out more than a regular person in the background. While if you put your own creative twist on it then you’re on your own to creatively re-introduce the characters.

2. Vision

This doubles as two because you can’t have Vision without Ambition/Determination or whatever other word you want to use. What I mean is that sometimes in media a Director is just thrust upon a project and the thing is, if the Director has no interest in the source material and doesn’t know what it’s about or even what made it popular then they’ll never care enough to finish the job properly.