Almost any fan will tell you this fact: adaptations are a risky game. Sometimes they work, sometimes they go bust. This is true whether it’s a game being adapted (so many Tomb Raiders), a book (Percy Jackson comes to mind), or even a movie (looking at you, Disney). A wise man once said, “There is nothing new under the sun” and nowhere is this more true than in Hollywood. In 2019, of the top 10 highest-grossing movies, only two were not based on an earlier work, and both of those were sequels. Either all the good ideas have been written, or Hollywood is just getting lazy.
One particular sector that constantly gets screwed by the adaptation machine is the animated adaptation. This covers adaptation of Japanese anime, as well as Western animation. Live-action adaptations rarely work, especially for serialized TV shows. This hasn’t stopped the suits in Hollywood from trying though. There have been multiple adaptations of Japanese anime, from Dragonball Evolution (2009), to Death Note and Ghost in the Shell (both 2017). Western animation is not spared as we’ve also been forced to endure what is perhaps the worst movie, and definitely the worst adaptation of all time with M. Night’s 2010 adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, a movie so bad the fandom has collectively chosen to deny its existence.
So, why? Why do adaptations of this kind rarely pan out? Well, there are a few reasons.
First of all, there’s the inherent problems in adapting story told in one medium to another. The way a story unfolds in a movie is completely different to how that same story would be told in a TV series. For example, Avatar: The Last Airbender has a runtime of 1464 minutes, or 24 hours and 14 minutes of story, with every episode crucial to the understanding of the show. Just the first season has a runtime of about 460 minutes. Adapting that into a 2 hour movie will still leave tons of material out, material that is vital, not just for story connectivity, but for character development. As a comparison, the Star Wars franchise (the Skywalker Saga and both anthology films) has a total runtime of 24 hours and 40 minutes. Make of that what you will.
Secondly, a live-action adaptation changes the most important part of an animated character, their voice. Imagine, if you will, a Mufasa not voiced by James Earl Jones, or a Spongebob not voiced by Tom Kenny. The voice of an animated character is our quickest way of recognizing them. It is embedded into their character, and adds depth to them. A lot of people could play Sterling Archer in a live-action adaptation (Henry Cavill best of them), but if they don’t sound like H. Jon Benjamin, is it really Archer? No, it isn’t. A character’s voice is as much a part of them as their design.
Third, sometimes the story can only be told in an animated medium. Because animation isn’t limited by the same reality constrains that hold live-action back, animators can do so much more with characters as well as stories. A lot of these won’t translate well in a 3D space, sometimes for the simple reason that it wasn’t meant to be in 3D. 2019’s The Lion King, which is a photorealistic adaptation of the 1994 classic, runs into some of these problems. A 2D animated lion can sing, and dance and do all the things that Simba does in the movie. Real lions can’t do that. Real lions don’t smile, or talk, or have wide-ranging facial emotions. So, the 3D lions felt somewhat lifeless, because, a real lion cub just can’t convey the emotional weight of his father dying like an animated one.
Fourth, and perhaps most egregious, the adapters are barely familiar with the story in the first place. In order to properly adapt something, you must be intimately familiar with the source material. For this reason, I maintain that the best adapters are the original creators. Most adapters of animated works are just not that familiar with the source material, if at all. What usually happens is they see a product with a large and devout following and thing that they can just copy the “big moments” with no understanding of why those moments are big. There is also the curious case of strange changes to the canon that no person having watched the animation would have made or agreed with. To this day, I am convinced that Shyamalan didn’t actually watch Avatar, and just hoped we’d be too distracted by the bad CGI to notice the worse writing.
After all this, one thing we know is that the Suits in Tinseltown will not stop making adaptations, I mean there’s another Avatar adaptation in the works; this time by Netflix. So as more news about this latest attempt trickles down in bits, just remember: odds are, it’s gonna be bad.
