Speed Racer Hollywood Film Bombs

[Talon87]

And nothing of value was lost.

Except the prospects for any deserving anime, like Kaiji or Planetes, to be picked up by a Los Angeles studio and filmed in live-action for an American audience. :doh:

http://digg.com/movies/Speed_Racer_Bomb ... OTC-widget (http://digg.com/movies/Speed_Racer_Bombs_at_Box_Office_Barely_Earns_20_Mi llion?OTC-widget)

[Doppleganger]

I don't think anyone seriously expected Speed Racer to do that well, if American can't replicate anime in their own cartoons, what makes them think it'll work in a live-action?

Dragonball, Akira and Ghost in the Shell will probably do just as badly.

[Lindz]

Except the prospects for any deserving anime, like Kaiji or Planetes, to be picked up by a Los Angeles studio and filmed in live-action for an American audience. :doh:

Sounds good to me! I don't care if its anime or not, nothing animated should be turned around and made live-action!

[Talon87]

Why? :( That's like saying "nothing is ever made in the wrong format." If that was true, and you strongly subscribed to that philosophy, then you ought to renounce 90% of the anime you enjoy -- since 90% of the anime period is adapted from manga and light novels! :|

No, I disagree. I think that sometimes there are some truly great animes which would be even better and would connect to millions more people if they were live-action instead of animated. Planetes and Kaiji are my two brainchild examples of this.

[Doppleganger]

Most of the time though, Talon, light novels and manga are superior to their anime counterparts, especially when they were the original material. The exceptions are often shows that people laud about in legend and are extremely rare - Ever17 would never work as an anime, manga, OR light novel, partly for reasons you already know and partly for a reason you have yet to find out.

That said, Speed Racer was probably the most likely anime series to succeed as a movie IMV, because its high degree of localization made it as closely related to an American show without being bad like a 4Kids or Nelvanna production. The Wachowski Brothers based the movie on the SR dub, rather than the original MachGoGoGo, so one can only imagine the pit of horrible the three other anime I mentioned will end up in come next year.

[Lindz]

Most animated stuff turned live-action these days end up 50% or more animated anyway via CG so really whats the point? Maybe the most realistic super down to earth stuff could be done we live action but even still the actors'll look and sound nothing like their animated counterparts.

[Talon87]

Most animated stuff turned live-action these days end up 50% or more animated anyway via CG.But that's not what I mean, girl, and you know it! :( I'm talking "produce a live-action Kaiji just like how you produced Prison Break and 24, Fox!" And "produce a live-action Planetes just as you produced the remake of BattleStar Galactica, SciFi!"

To answer Doppel, I would say that most of the time the "manga is better than the anime" claim holds true for me only when:
1- the plot in the anime is drastically different and inferior
2- the plot in the anime was either too fast (because they cut so much stuff out) or too slow (because they stretched out a 4-volume manga into 26 episodes).

Otherwise, it's no comparison: anime every time. Like, here's my rundown with X's and O's:

o Chobits anime ~> Chobits manga
o Planetes anime > Planetes manga
x Love Hina anime > Love Hina manga
o Hikaru no Go anime > Hikaru no Go manga (from what I've read)
o Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu anime > Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu light novel
o Minami-ke anime >> Minami-ke manga

I go through my top 6 anime of all time and there's only one whose manga was better. Why? Because even the ones whose plots are slightly inferior (e.g. Chobits by a tad) have so much to offer that print doesn't! Color! Music! Motion!

I can't speak for every anime fan, but for me, the only manga that really works well is comedy or drama; shounen action is AWFUL in manga form! I know Loki strongly disagrees, but for me, action = I damn well better see some fun fight scenes in motion!! I don't want to look at one cel with two swords touching each other and have to imagine to myself a 5-minute sword-fighting scene. No thanks. No fucking thanks. I'll take Naruto the anime (minus the solid filler arc) and Rurouni Kenshin the anime (thru the end of S2) any day over their respective, lauded mangas.

With Minami-ke especially, where the dialogue is i-den-ti-cal to that in the manga and so are the stories, the anime is 1000x better because of the color, motion, and (never woulda thought this mattered so much before seeing this show!) voice acting. The voices for the three Minami sisters go above and beyond how I would have read Koharu's original speech bubbles otherwise.

[Kasumi Violet]

I'm not surprised. The trailer for the movie looked overly colorful and dumb.

- KV

[Mcsweeney]

There's really no excuse for an anime adaptation of a manga to be worse. If it is, they screwed up somehow.

I can easily see how a book can be better than even a flawless movie adaptation, because there's often things like powerful/humourous narrative bits that are impossible to carry over, but an anime is just a manga "brought to life".

[Muyotwo]

Why were people expecting great things from a film based on the worst anime of all time?

[Kat Katraine]

Geez ol' Speed Racer crashed faster that that live action Pokemon movie that was supposed to be filmed around six years ago!