This Week in Anime

Are Some Manga Truly "Unadaptable"?

Steve
Nick, I spend a decent portion of my words in this column complaining about anime overproduction, so in the interest of fairness, let's take the opposite tack. Why isn't more anime being made? Specifically, why isn't more good anime being made from all of the good manga out there? And if we have time at the end, I guess we can tackle the age-old question of why we can't have nice things.

I believe you meant to say the Dead Dead Demon's Dededede Destruction anime, but I can see where you got confused. Very similar plots.

And that is indeed the genesis of this column. Somehow, this is the first anime adaptation we've gotten out of the two-plus decades' worth of critically acclaimed manga from the twisted mind of Inio Asano.

It's worth keeping in mind that when people talk about "unadaptable" manga, they're talking about a complex intersection of many possible reasons. But a recurring one is certainly the quality of the art itself. Drawing a manga is an entirely different beast from animating an anime. It's a different medium with a slew of different tools and different advantages/disadvantages. It means you can do a huge two-page spread full of intricate detail that you need a magnifying glass to fully appreciate—which you can do because the image is static. It also means you can do silly and extremely potent stuff like this with a single page turn.

One of my favorite title pages in anything ever.

To that point, I guess it's also worth keeping in mind that "unadaptable" is usually shorthand for "unable to be adapted well given the current state of the industry, outside of some unforeseeable moonshot project." You can adapt anything if you put your mind to it! And if you lower your standards to ankle height.

Asano almost certainly uses 3D rendering software to assist in the creation of his manga, too. It's just the nature of art to incorporate and adapt to the tools available. The 2016 Berserk might have gotten it wrong, but that's no reason to write off the technique once and for all. Heck, I thought Dorohedoro would never get an anime for similar reasons, and I was similarly skeptical when the adaptation relied heavily on 3DCG. And lo and behold, in the end, I thought the show did great!

And that's very important. But as much as I enjoyed it, I think it's also a great example of the weaknesses that often arise when translating manga into anime. Just like translating text, there's no such thing as a 1:1 replacement. My go-to example is the very first panel of Dorohedoro, in which Q Hayashida immediately lets the audience know exactly the kind of manga they're in for: grody, violent, and always tactile.

The analogous shot from the anime just doesn't have anywhere near the same impact.

I'd rather not. However, I do like to think about anime adaptations as an act of trade—an equivalent exchange, if you like. While you might inevitably lose some of the artistry and fidelity of the mangaka's work, you can get voice acting, color, and cool cuts of animation in return. Maybe the adaptation even takes a wholly unexpected route and allows you to see the manga in an entirely new light. Under ideal circumstances, those added dimensions make up for whatever is lost.

That's why, in almost all circumstances, I prefer a creative adaptation to a faithful one. Just go hogwild with it. That's how you get the psychedelic eye candy of Mob Pyscho 100. Nobody on that team cared about meticulously redrawing manga panels. They cared about giving us sick shit like this.

I see similar attitudes pop up around Shinichi Sakamoto's work, like Innocent or #DRCL. And yeah, with that dizzying level of detail on the page informing the texture and tone of the work, why would you want to waste the effort on an adaptation that would inevitably fall short of that quintessence?

Jumping back to Asano's case, I think it's not just the level of detail, but also the deliberate ways he plays with form that have made his previous works bereft of anime. While Goodnight Punpun's collage of minimalism, realism, and surrealism could theoretically work in anime form, they're already assembled so powerfully in the manga. You'd need the perfect team adapting it to even come close.

Definitely. I was looking through my bookcase for manga that hadn't been made into anime yet, and my Kyoko Okazaki section jumped out at me. She's one of my favorite mangaka, but I don't think there's a lot of demand to animate single-volume josei stories from the '90s about flawed, complex women. Though they did make Helter Skelter into a live-action film, so there is that.

And as I racked my brain for other examples of "unadaptable" manga, that's the situation I kept coming back to. It usually had nothing to do with art or length or some other untranslatable quality of the manga form. They were, by and large, stories that were too obscure, weird, or salacious to hope for enough attention to warrant an anime.

I'm happy whenever we get something transgressive to the screen, like a Flowers of Evil or a Scum's Wish, but there's just so much else out there that I can't imagine ever being palatable for a general TV audience. For example, I'm not holding my breath to see Himegoto: Juukyuusai no Seifuku animated, which is stuffed to the gills with gender, sexuality, toxicity, and all other manners of spiciness. I love it, but its very first chapter also ends with one of the protagonists indulging in a rape fantasy. Not exactly a Saturday morning cartoon either.

True, it's an interesting and developing space. Another example I'd throw out there is Yuureitou, which riffs on Edogawa Ranpo-esque horror mysteries with a lot of fun camp and narrative dexterity. It also stars a trans man as one of the protagonists, and while the manga isn't always the best at handling that (it indulges in both exploitation and empowerment), he's a great character. I honestly think the story could be a natural fit for an anime—in manga form it's a definite page-turner—but we haven't even gotten an official stateside licensing of it. Couldn't tell you why, except for the aforementioned general lack of nice things.

Kinda feels like every new update keeps giving us the runaround. Like we've been going in circles. Wish there was some other shape I could use to describe that.

Those snippets we have gotten are pretty damn good, though. Looking back to our earlier points, Hiroshi Nagashima seems to have at last found the right balance between preserving the intrinsic creepiness of Ito's art and granting it motion. I guess the tradeoff is that it takes at least half a decade of constant work to accomplish that. This begs the question of whether that's worth pursuing in the first place.

Another fun angle to think about is "unadaptable" manga from immensely popular creators with proven hits. No matter how big Chainsaw Man gets, for some reason, I just can't imagine anybody gracing Fire Punch with an anime.

Probably because of all the cannibalism and incest in the first chapter.

You know, you do have a point there. If Pupa can get an anime, anything is possible. Maybe the world is a little bigger and a little brighter than I thought.

You can also think about it mathematically: the number of manga out there will always be greater than the number of anime. Instead of a call for despair, I think that's a great call to read more manga! If you're sick of sifting through isekai every season, there's plenty more variety and experimentation to be found on the printed page. Take a chance. Broaden your horizons. Just don't forget to temper your expectations with the most important lesson of all: