Within the past decade or so, we Americans have seen a trend of comic book-based movies and adaptations from books all over the silver screen. In fact, it’s become so commonplace that we expect it now. If there not a summer blockbuster that isn’t based on a comic or a book, good or bad, then it hasn’t been a fulfilling year, has it? Even the success of Transformers has proven that other venues can be tapped for potential in the film industry.

So it’s only fitting that anime become the next big thing to be converted by Hollywood. And that’s got potential in and of itself, right?

Perhaps not as much as you’d think.


Now, let’s put things into perspective, shall we? Anime is a blanket term, used by Americans to describe Japanese-style animation, and by Japanese to describe any type of animation from around the world. Anime became a staple of Japanese culture, particularly back in the 1930’s when the country didn’t have much of a live-action movie industry like America was creating with silent films. Anime therefore was created as the main way to tell stories, using distinct forms of animation drawing. This was the mainstay until around the 1980’s when Japan became more comfortable with producing live-action movies and television, but by that time anime had already become a part of Japanese culture, and indeed had even migrated overseas and had taken off well in the States as also.

Anime and manga within the past 20 years has made a sufficient name for itself here in America, and has succeeded in ingraining itself into our culture as well, almost as much as American-made comics and books. So when comics and books began making a huge jump into the realm of movie-adaptations, and many doing extremely well, it was only a matter of time until anime got roped into the trend as well. However, there’s a huge difference between making adaptations of American and European-made comics and books into movies created by the same culture of people, and making movies based on animation of an entirely different culture like Japan. It’s like trying to take over something that’s already been perfectly established by someone else, and molding it into your own creature with little regard to what the original intent or method of said object was. It’s just banking on the success of others, isn’t it?

Of course I’m referring more towards American film industries trying to bank on successful Japanese anime series by making them into live-action films. Japanese film industries making live-action adaptation of their own works hasn’t had that bad of a showing. I personally thought the Death Note live-action movies were pretty well-done, and faithful to the manga/anime. That’s a good example of a culture doing good by their own. However, how different do you think things would have been had the film been produced by Americans?

There now seems to be a boom of live-action anime adaptations being gobbled up by American studios. Dragonball: Evolution of course will be released in late spring, and is supposed to be based off the original Dragonball manga/anime by Akira Toriyama. Despite high hopes from fans early-on, full-length trailers for the film have revealed it to be incredibly cheesy-looking with an American “twist” on the original story. (which more often than not goes badly in terms of culture-jumping with entertainment) As reported on recently, the rumors of a Cowboy Bebop live-action movie have been confirmed, with past-his-prime actor Keanu Reeves staring as series badass-slacker Spike Spiegal – which somehow makes some sad, morbid amount of sense considering creator Shinichir? Watanabe also helped with the Animatrix and seemingly loves American stupidity. There’s also still the thought of Leonardo DiCaprio going ahead with heading a live-action Ninja Scroll movie as well in the future (rather than Akira which has been handed off to another director), which makes makes next to no sense to me, but then again neither does any of this other than American capitalism. Then there’s the live-action Avatar movie; rumors of Neon Genesis Evangelion’s movie pre-production being re-ignited, and god only knows what else.

I can’t help but feel that live-action anime movies go hand-in-hand with live-action video game movies, and the scary thing about that is that a majority of the badly-made video game movies were based on American-made games. When America can’t even get its own native games properly converted into even decent movies on a consistent basis (let alone Japanese ones), exactly what hope is there for refitting Japanese anime into American-made films?

Prove me wrong, America.

For more info on live-action anime news: check out LiveActionAnime.org

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