In which I talk about hollywood adaptations of manga, selling out, how I respect Robert Potatoson, and why the idea itself is stupid

Alrighty then, you might have heard how they want to cast some non-teenage teenage heartrobs for the adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo's legendary scifi manga and anime film, Akira. You know, the one where they yell ''TESUOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!'' and ''KANEDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!'' and there's like the tentacle arm and shit. For instance, for the role of Kaneda(aaaaaaa!) they considered Justin Timberlake, Chris Pine and other handsome men (no homo) and Robert Potatoson or Andrew Garfeild for the role of Tetsuo(ooooooooooooo!)

Now, then the people in the colon of the internet started erupting in to flaming.. poo... shit... lost chain of thou.... well you get the idea, they did what they always do. Now, I, for instance, wanted to say something about Timberlake, since that guy is 30 already and they want to cast him as a teenage biker, but most of the poopoo was thrown at Robert Patinson, I mean, Potatoson.

Now, Patinson is kind of like a more successful version of Hayden Christensen, in that both of them were cast due to them both being capable of making 14 year olds (the girl ones, it would be weird if it were the boy kind) frothy in their loins but ended up kind of shitcanned by the nerds later on due to the stigmata of being cast in analgarbage. Now mind you, the difference is that Christensen was in something that is now considered shit by everyone (who has seen Red Letter Media's reviews, atleast) and has promptly dropped off the radar, while Potatoson is in something that isn't quite as terribad in terms of everything as much as it is just written for 14 year old girls who don't know what a dick really is.
But the thing I wanted to say about Potatoson and Christensen to a lesser extent, is that they're not terrible actors, but saying that they are makes it easier for nerdprinces to hate them.
What I will say, is that I respect Potatoson since he made the same choice I would have : sold out.
I, the District Attorney of Hell, respect Potatoson for being a sellout. If you asked me if I wanted a couple of million dollars in exchange for participating in something I have no interest at best and will hate at worst, my answer would be ''I got my pen ready, motherfucker, I ain't got all day, it's gay vampire time! Shit! Where's my eyeliner?!''
Now, the average hipster or nerdprince would be like ''nooooo, do not compromise your integrity and sell out!'', to which I respond ''You can keep your useless integrity while I get payed, fucker! You're just haters who would never get a chance ether since you suck or are too stupid to!''

No but anway, this wasn't really the topic.
The topic would be hollywood adaptations of manga, and live action adaptations in general.
So you might ask me, what is the best live action film based off of anime made by the US. There's not much to chose from, atleast now, but still, let me surprise you.
Guyver 2 : Dark Hero, based off of the manga Bio Booster Armor Guyver and starring David Hayter, who is awesome. Now but here's the thing, when they adapted this thing, they weren't like ''let's find a big franchise and make it in to a million dollar adaptation'', shit no, they were like ''Kids are in to that Power Rangers thing, right? This Guyver shit is like that but like darker and way more violent. Eh, it's worth a try.''
In fact, the very idea of Guyver as a manga in the first place is that it's inspired by Kamen Rider and other Tokusatsu, which was aimed at children and had FX budget limits, so the comic, made in the same era of violence in manga as Fist Of The North Star, was a way to have way more over the top powerlevel shit and gore without fear of censors or a limited budget (since it's drawings and shit). Guyver the movie is just Guyver the comic going back to it's roots. In general, Guyver Dark Hero takes some liberties with the source material, but atleast it's spiritualy true to what Guyver is like in the comics and the OVA (you might even say more true to the comics than the 2005 anime was).
So how can accept the changes made to Guyver while shun the ones they would put in to, say, Dragonball Evolution?

Well, here's the thing. I know it's impossible to make a straight-up 1:1 adaptation of anything unless the source material is brief and easly adaptable. Otherwise, you need to apply changes. If you thought that Dragon Ball Evolution should adapt every arc picture perfectly, then you don't actually want to watch a film based off of it, you just want to watch the series by itself again.
But it's still possible to remain spiritualy true, which is what Guyver : Dark Hero did. DBE didn't do that. DBE did stupid shit by americanizing a movie based off of a series that was Asian but not specific to any country to some extent, but then when you throw in the asian elements on top of the americanized fundaments, it all becomes a clusterfuck. Now, the Guyver movies did americanize everything, but the difference is that Guyver isn't as much culture specific with it's themes. It's about a guy in a techno-organic suit of power armor fucking up monsters, and it's fucking awesome. Any culture can relate to that.

I would actually say Akira might have a better theoretical chance at working as a movie than Dragon Ball could have had from the get-go.
While Akira was very much a product of Japan (if the title didn't tip you off) in a very specific time, atleast it's themes and shit can atleast be applied to the rest of the world and maybe to other ages, too. It's a movie about teenage rebellion, the scars that war has left on the earth and superpowers. Those are things we all could relate to. And it has a pretty simple act constructure.
Now, Akira and Ghost In The Shell are like the Watchmen and the Blade Runner of Japanese popular fiction, both thematicaly and in terms of significance. (well okay, Akira/Watchmen thematicaly maybe not as much, but GitS/Blade Runner, totally)
And like those two things, it is possible to do masterpieces out of them, on paper. But to do that in reality, you need a budget, a good director and simply not fucking up.
With DB, you run in to the first problem from the get go.
''Oh crap how do we work in the flying?''
''Does he have to be asian. No wait, what the fuck does the ethnical makeup of a Saiyan even compare to, he has black hair but that's all I can really tell, if I make him asian, they might call me a racist! Oh no wait, forget that, Hollywood themselves are racist so they won't want a main character played by an asian since that would make Joe McAverage remember his grandpa and Pearl Harbor and walk out''
''Energy blasts! How do we do that? How much will it cost?''
''This shit is like 48 volumes long, how the shit are we going to do this? What characters do we use? What part of the story?''

If you ask me what could be done what couldn't, the logic is simple. The more realistic and maybe short the manga is, or atleast has a story arc that can be opened and closed for the movie, the easier to adapt. Asia knows this. They stay the fuck away from doing something stupid like making One Piece or Naruto the Movie. They stick to what I just said, and do things like Death Note or Detroit Metal City. And those movies are cool. But they're also about guys sitting around having tense discussions about who is L and who is Kira or Spinal Tap meets Metalocalypse in Japan.
Hell, the chinese movie based off of Inital D wasn't that bad, altough I won't lie, I did watch it without subtitles and my knowledge in mandarin chinese doesn't stem beyond insults.
Or what about the Korean film Oldboy, based off of a Japanese manga? That movie was a good movie. But once again, it's all based in reality.

Riki Oh was also based on a manga, and it was batshit insane and I loved every minute of it, so I guess that proves that you don't always have to base it in total realism.

You know, a thing like Berserk, or Hellsing, or Trigun, or Cowboy Bebop, or Big O (eat a dick, mark) could be done, since, once again if done the right way, in my opinion. One Piece, on the other hand? Definately not. Bleach or Naruto could work in some way, but One Piece would be totally fucked. It would be like a huge acid trip that would alienate us all beyond belief.

Anime I genuinely reccomend : A guide to anime that I would argue is good part 1 : Shounen (yo, kitte kure, ningen nante taishta mon ja nai sa...)

Merry Jesus Day. And with that out of the way....

By now you probably have noticed that I like anime and I watch a fair share of it. I do consider myself to know a thing or two, altough you really shouldn't take my word as the law of the land (a comon misconception about anything some retards think about something one has posted on a web page, I'm just a dude, yo).

Now, if there is a word I like to use to describe my tastes, it would be ''Simple''. Simple doesn't mean stupid. Simple doesn't mean ''for children''. Simple doesn't mean ''cheaping out to reach a wider audience''. Simple simply means ''easy to grasp''. Making stories is a lot like describing physics or chemestry, you can go on and on in a tangent about some sort of complex bullshit, by the time I have already used the wifi the classroom has since it's next to the computer lab and have continued reading Achewood, or you can put it in to a few easy to understand sentances, or maybe show me, then I'll be able to understand even the most complicated concepts as long as the rules remain clear.

Shounen!

Shounen manga is generally intended in Japan for like 12 year olds or something, but doesn't mean it's only for them. Shounen Jump, obviously, the magazine that contains most of the most the famous shounen manga. Mangas like Fullmetal Alchemist or Fist Of The North Star or Great Teacher Onizuka have been categorized as Shounen simply since they were published in magazines with Shounen in the title, but I would argue that they're really not, atleast not by today's standards.

Let's start with an obvious choice that some might argue becomes unobvious again due to the obviousness and the fact that it gets hated on. The definitive shounen manga, Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball, the 42 volume manga spanned from 1982 until 1995. It was adapted in to two animes, the first one, Dragon Ball, spanned for 153 episodes and adapted the first 14-ish volumes detailing Goku's childhood up until his fight with Piccolo Junior and becoming a man. It was followed by a 293 episode (edited down to 272 episodes in the initial western release by Funimation) anime that told the rest of the story contained in the manga. It also had several anime movies offering non-canon side adventures taking place in debatable time spaces in the story. It was followed up by the anime Dragon Ball GT, which was made after Akira Toriyama ended the original manga and had a story made by the studio, it was a pretty big failure and a lot of fans consider it non-canon. Recently it was rehashed in to a condensed, remastered series called Dragon Ball Kai.

Anyway, I'm not sure if DBZ really needs any big introduction, since it's one of those anime everyone has heard of. It popularized, if not created a lot of the tropes present in shounen manga, such as the aspect of power levels and how the characters scale according to them, the training thing to become way, way stronger, tournaments, transformations and the way how the inner energy is a plot device to do some superhuman shit. Altough Fist Of The North Star and Saint Seiya also had some of these elements, in them these things were more vague which makes them less definitive.

The story of Dragon Ball is the story of Son Goku, a naive country bumpkin with incredible power, and his adventures that involve the Dragon Balls, ancient crystal balls that can grant you any wish by summoning the eternal dragon Shenron.
Dragon Ball chronicles Goku's life from when he was a kid to when he had grandchildren, when he has fought the baddest motherfuckers in the galaxy, in all of nature and magically possible across the earth, the galaxy and even the afterlife.
Dragon Ball has an expansive cast, altough most of them become irrelevant about at the time when Z begins.

The first 14 volumes were more about the adventure and make a lot of dick and vagina jokes and less about the fighting, and the being stronger aspect was less about how much Ki you have (like in Bleach) and much more about how you can adapt to this situation (like in One Piece or Naruto, or One Piece).
But after the time skip and the introduction of Goku's son, Gohan, the series becomes much more power level and fight centric and it's a lot more about WE HAVE TO SAVE THE GALAXY FROM EVILDUDER, YO! But not all of the charm is abandoned.

Definitive version : highly debatable. The manga is the most straight up version and arguably the best, but the anime adaptation is fine on their own, but they suffer from the two anime STDs of Bad Pacing and Filler, but I kind of like the expanded universe they created with the movies and the TV specials. GT can be ignored since it's not very good. Kai has a superior soundtrack and doesn't suffer from the STDs, but the digitaly edited remastering isn't that good and the voice actors (in Japan) are now all old people and have started not to give a shit about their performances since they're old, maybe not as much the heroes but the villains show this pretty clearly.

Biggest flaw : the translations, continuous arguments over demographic and the totally fucked dubs, and maybe the plot element of powerlevels.

But the things that make it good would be the fact that if you go to it with an adult mind set, you can still enjoy it and see things you wouldn't see as a child, provided that you're not watching the OG Funimation dub.

You still have to appreciate DB for it's historical significance to manga if not for what it is itself, since it defined shounen manga in Japan and was one of the first anime to become really, really popular world wide.

What you can call the true successor to DBZ, Eichiro Oda's One Piece is a still running 50+ volume manga about pirates, who are pirates in the same way the characters in Naruto could be called ninjas, on a seemingly never-ending quest to find the ultimate treasure that the legendary pirate Gold Roger hid at the end of the Grand Line, an isolated ocean crossing the middle of the planet, going from island to island, encountering the inhabitants of them, rival pirates and the world government who want to stop the age of piracy.

The main character, Monkey D. Luffy (everyone calls him Luffy) is a Goku-like weirdo with a big dream of becoming the Pirate King by finding One Piece, a quest that even the mightiest pirates consider nigh-impossible. At first everyone thinks Luffy is crazy or really, really naive, but when he displays his actual power, people quickly stop laughing. Luffy has consumed the Gomu Gomu No MI (Rubber Rubber Fruit), a Devil Fruit which gives his body the elasticity of rubber, which he combines with his monstrous physical power results in making him a very powerful fighter.

He is joined by his crew that he gathers on his journey, his crew is joined by Roronoa Zoro, a swordsman who weilds three swords and wants to be the strongest swordsman on the earth, Nami, the navigator who mostly serves as the voice of reason and provides comical punishment for most of the crew, Usopp, a cowardly sniper who has to constantly face his fears and try to man up in the face of danger, Sanji, a cook who fights only with his legs and fancies himself a ladies man, Chopper, the ship's child-like doctor and freak of nature that is a cross between a reindeer and a human, Nico Robin, an archeologist who spends most of her time not really interacting with the other crewmen and being mysterious, Franky, the fucking awesome cyborg guy who runs on cola, Brook, the ''gentleman'' skeleton with an afro who is no gentleman at all. (also I would like to take an educated guess that Boa Hancock will probably join the crew at some point after her status as a Warlord Of The Sea will be revoked, maybe).

But the things that in my mind makes One Piece in many ways superior to DBZ would be that A : it feels like Oda has a lot of imagination and B : the fact that it never really lets go of the adventurous feel that Dragon Ball let go of during Z.

Flaws : Some people may not like the artstyle. 4kids tarnished the reputation of this series with a god-awful, censorship-filled dub. Some very uneducated people think it's much too kiddie to take seriously.

But the thing that might stop you from enjoying One Piece would be it's ball numbing lenght. The anime has nearly 500 episodes at this point, which is slightly less than DB, DBZ and DBGT combined. Watching all of this would require a massive time dedication. And the manga has 60+ volumes, which is also pretty damn long. And the manga isn't anywhere near it's end anyway.

Now for something a bit more obscure (not that you could truly call anything running in Shounen Jump in the past 15 years ''obscure''), Hiroyuki Takei's Shaman King. It has had an anime adaptation that I've never watched, but I have read the manga back to back.

Shaman King is a pretty typical shounen manga about various characters fighting in a tournament and pretty much every trope established by DBZ is used, but with a ''spirit'' theme. But what made it enjoyable was that the characters were pretty well developed through the series and they and their abilities were quite imaginative.

The story is about Yoh Asakura, a young shaman (the universal word in Shaman King for people who can mess around with spirit based abilities) who participates in the Shaman Fight, a tournament that happens every 500 years where shamans from across the earth fight over the right to use the power of the Great Spirit, which is pretty much god, to change the direction in which the future will go and fufill the winner's wish.
Yoh himself doesn't really desire anything, since he acts like he's stoned all the time and doesn't really need anything. However, Yoh's twin brother Hao Asakura, who is quite possibly the strongest Shaman on earth since he commands the Spirit Of Fire, wants to wipe out humanity so nature could rule over the world again. So Yoh's quest to win isn't quite ''I want to make my dream come true'' as much as it's not letting Hao have his wish.
Yoh, who's spirit partner is the ghost samurai Amidamaru is joined by his allies, the ex-delinquent and fucking awesome guy, Bokuto No Ryu (Ryu Of The Wooden Sword) who is partnered with the spirit of the bandit Tokagero, Yoh's rival Tao Ren (the Vegeta of Shaman King), who at first hated humanity in the same way as Hao but then realised he was wrong (thanks to the power of FRIENDSHIP) who is partnered with the ghost of the ancient chinese warrior Bason, HoroHoro the snowboarding nature enthusiast and Faust XIII, a necromancer who has led himself to near-death with his obsession of reviving his wife.

Some anime fans complain how tired a trope the tournament thing is, since it's the cheapest way to get two characters, regardless of their relationship to get in a fight, but I actually really like this cliche, I think it works better than in like Bleach where they just go on a walk and get assulted by someone like in a JRPG.

The interesting thing about the fights is the Over Soul abilities, where they channel the spirit of their ghost partner in to a medium item to generate a spirit-powered weapon (a concept ripped off by Bleach but with cutting the ghost parner part out, altough I think the idea might have originated from YuYu Hakusho), and the Oversouls are inventive enough to seem original without seeming as absurd as some of the Devil Fruit abilities in One Piece.

Biggest flaw : There are no real flaws about it, but it's kind of like the Uncharted series as it brings nothing new to the table, instead just being well constructed. A personal complaint I have is the incredibly wrong way naked feet are drawn by the artist. Oh yeah and also the manga was canceled around 17 chapters before the story could come to it's natural conclusion, but the Kanzenban rerelease of the manga a few years later had the last 17 chapters in it.


Yeah I'd suppose this would be it for the first volume of reccomendations, since the shounen genre kind of is the same thing over and over, and I want to keep FMA, Eyeshield 21, Hokuto No Ken and others which I don't quite consider pure shounen in my hand for a bit longer.

happy holidays, niggili dillilies

Anime Blu Ray Box Set Review : Full Metal Panic the first series

Full Metal Panic! is a novel series adapted in to 3 animes and several mangas. It is half military mecha anime with a certain sense of realism and half slice of life high school comedy with slightly romantic overtones. It is one of the first animes I watched when I started getting in to animu for realz.

The premise is that Sgt. Sosuke Sagara of the anti-terrorist group Mithril is sent to a high school in Japan to protect Kaname Chidori, a seemingly normal high school student. He has to protect her since she is a Whispered, a person who has data about secret technology programmed in to her subconciousness and kind of also ESP. This makes her a target of terrorists who want the data in her.
Sosuke has to fit in to high school, which is way more hard than it sounds like, since while he is a great soldier, he is also incredibly socially inept and behaves like Mr.Spock if he was a violent military otaku. Chidori herself doesn't help much, since most of the time she's annoyed by Sosuke's lack of understanding for people's feelings. At first she thinks he's just some military otaku who takes his obsession a bit too far. Chidori herself is a huge tsundere so this results in Sosuke being hit with a lot of objects.
Other characters include Tessa Testarossa, the 16 year old captain of Mithril's nuclear submarine (which might make her the most unplausable character in the series), Sosuke's teammates Kurz Weber and Melissa Mao, the no-nonsense manlyman Lt. Commander Kalinin and some other military members and classmates of Sosuke.

Yeah so it sounds kind of stupid and generic but the thing that sets it apart is that it's actually well written and executed. The characters have like actual depth to them

The series can be divided in to two kinds of episodes, comedy episodes and serious military mecha shooty bollocks drama episodes. I actually favor the comedy episodes. While the military action is decent, at times it is a bit too boring. The comedy episodes, on the other hand, are hysterical.

So about the serious drama episodes. These are the episodes where Sosuke is in a mecha and fighting terrorists. The mecha action is fine, in FMP they don't use particle rifles or any of that scifi shit, instead everything is done using contemporary firearms, just big enough to be used by mecha. Also giant knives. And it's actually a pretty realistic version of mecha combat, altough nowhere near as gritty and uber-realistic as VOTOMS. The mecha themselves aren't huge, in fact, they might be 2/3 the size of a Gundam.
A thing that spoils the realism for me, however, is the Black Technology and the Lambda Driver. This thing generates energy from your emotions to create sheilds or destructive bursts of energy, which makes it HAXXXX when all the other mecha are stuck using shotguns and knives.
But the really boring part of the drama episodes is the fact that it takes them so long for actual fighting to happen.

I do have to say I liked Gauron. Gauron is intimidating as fuck, once you see him grin you know that you are going to be fucked up hard. You really do get the feeling that he is insane, but not in like that ''oh you poor misguided soul''-way, more in that ''AWWWW SHIT PLEASE DON'T KILL ME DAWG'' way.

A lot of the humor in FMP stems from the fact that Sosuke has very little understanding of how average teenagers behave. This might sound stupid but it actually creates a lot of hilarious scenes. My favorite episode is where they try to teach Sosuke about dating and understanding women, that episode left me in stiches.

But jokes aside, Sosuke Sagara is basiclly the character that Heero Yuy tried to be. Sosuke is an emotionless badass who is amazing on the battle field, but has like actual flaws and depth, unlike Heero. While Heero's emotionless douchery was never really that intricite to the plot but was kind of there, Sosuke's lack of emotions play a significant role and in a way it's ironic that he has to pilot the Arbalest, a mecha that has the Lambda Driver, which is activated by emotions.

But really, think that the action episodes really outweight the comedy ones, which is a shame since the comedy episodes are gold while the mecha action is compitent but doesn't have a lot of omph to the fighting, since the Lambda Driver is used mostly just by Gauron who uses it to kill grunts with ease and everyone else just shoots with regular weapons.

The lowest point in the series for me was probably the arc with Sosuke and characters who are both introduced and killed in the same arc trying to assassinate Gauron in the middle east. There is no comical relief and besides Sosuke and Gauron there are no characters we actually care about and it takes them like 5 episodes to fight, only to have the fight end in 2 minutes.

Also Tomokazu Seki (countless roles, including Domon Kasshu, Beyond The Grave, Ichiro Miyata) does a great job as Sosuke Sagara, but when Sosuke starts to yell hotbloodedly he starts to sound like Domon Kasshu, which is cool as fuck. Satsuki Yukino (Yoruichi Shihoin, others) plays Chidori and has a somewhat memorable vocal performance compared to other japanese voice actresses which all blend together for me. Speaking of which, Yukana Nogami (C.C. from Code Geass) plays Tessa Testarossa in a fitting but not very memorable way, altought I might have prefered Yukari Fukui. Akio Othsuka (Solid Snake/Big Boss, Batou, Brian Hawk, Moomin's Papa (only one person will get the reference)) does a good job as Kalinin, but I feel that he didn't have a lot of interesting things to say. Shinichiro Miki (Takumi Fujiwara, Kisuke Urahara, Roy Mustang in FMA Brotherhood (but not the first)) is very fitting as Kurz Weber. Masahiko Tanaka (Ryo Mashiba) plays Gauron, and he fits well with the psychopathic nature of Gauron.

So do I reccomend FMP? Well if you like mecha anime you could do a lot worse, but the mecha part of the series takes up the most of the series while the humor is left in second place. If you just want to watch a funny slice of life then I'd suppose you should just buy Full Metal Panic Fumoffu, since that takes all the humor that was excluded from this series and just makes one big slice of life comedy out of it, which is actually the best Full Metal Panic series.

Oh also I'll probably not review The Second Raid since Funimation, in their infinite wisdom, decided to make the first series and Fumoffu region A and B, but not The Second Raid. So until there's a EU release of TSR I probably won't watch it.