Super Official Anime Discussion Thread

[Super_Boom]

pokoko said:
There is one other consideration about ERASED that is an unfortunate, yet common occurrence with manga-to-anime projects, and that is that the anime is moving much faster and is thus losing some of the more subtle layers of exposition.

For instance, and I think I've mentioned this before, but Kayo is shown to be more of an unpopular outcast in the manga. The alienation from her peers is more pronounced and it was harder for the main character to get close to her. The main character, for his part, spends a lot more time wondering what he should do, where in the anime he seems to have his plan in place immediately.

The differences aren't bad, and there have been manga adaptions that have suffered much worse (looking at you, Yamada and the Seven Witches) but the pace in ERASED is leaving a little bit of content out and I think people can feel that to some degree.

I've been mulling this post over in my head for a bit. I think the big problem with moving from text to animation is that narrative sequences don't always make the transition very well. Having a controlled narrative works well in text, but anime viewers will get bored with constant narrative in animation. Kinda just thinking over my recent convo over Hunter x Hunter...and realize it kinda applies to this as well (sorry to bring this up behind your back, Lucky). This applies even more to light novels...given the nature of how they're written.

As someone who reads a lot, I'm not really sure if this is a good or a bad thing. Missing parts of the story is always bad, and losing key parts of a character's background or why they're thinking a certain way will have a direct impact on how you appreciate a part of the story. On the other hand, I can definitely think of times where I preferred the visual adaptation due to constant exposition. I read the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a while back, and remember thinking how overwhelming the way the author set up scenes was. He would basically narrate entire life stories of characters in their heads, even if said characters really weren't that important in the scheme of things. I was honestly glad the recent film focused less on that and more on the action of the story. Maybe the best option is to find a middle-ground...or to find other creative ways to get the narrative across.

Speaking of Yamada, I think that actually brings up a seperate issue, in that a lot of anime are created solely to boost the sales of the manga or light novels. It's pretty evident with something like Yamada-kun, where a well-written manga is basically adapted into what seems like a collection of PVs rather than a single cohesive story. It's kind of weird to think about, since I feel like Western media adopts the opposite philosophy, but manga volumes in Japan tend to have much higher profit margins than anime DVD/BR. 

I still liked that anime overall...it just also happened to be one of the worst cases of the above example I can think of. 90 chapters into 12 episodes is ridiculous.