| Super_Boom said: 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. |
It's definitely true that anime and manga have different strengths and weaknesses and sometimes the material is adjusted for that reason. My go-to example for this is Chihayafuru. The anime is so good at showing the actual game being played with an amazing sense of speed and drama. The manga can't match that. On the other hand, the manga is incredible for showing individual moments where you just stare at the image and feel what the mangaka is trying to express. It was much better in that sense than the anime.
In terms of exposition, there are also instances where tightening up the source material for the anime is a good thing. Though I dropped it for a different reason, the anime version of GATE is (thus far) less boring than the manga version, which had large chunks of exposition panels about economics and politics that meshed badly with the harem+military manga it was at other times.
I think ERASED is more of a net loss, though. Some scenes can be taken out with little impact, certainly, but I really thought Kayo's sense of isolation in the manga made it more heartbreaking, as did the way it spent more time on the troubled relationship between the main character and his mother, which you only learn the root of later.
Oh, and, unpopular though this opinion might be, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo bored me to tears and made me totally lose focus on the case and not care about the characters. It was one of those books where I found myself not paying attention to what I was reading and I'd have to go back over a paragraph because my attention had slipped. I haven't seen any of the film versions.
