Make It Anime (Tag Post)

I honestly didn’t know this was a tag until Yomu’s post pinged back…So kudos to Yomu for this.

Rules:

• Thank the person who nominated you and link back to their blog post.
• Choose 1 book, movie and TV show of your choice that you think could work as an anime. (A series of books or movies is allowed e.g. Lord of the Rings, Hunger Games)
  • If you want to pick more than 1 from each section that’s fine. Or if you can’t think of one for a specific category that’s fine also.
• Explain why you think your choices could work as an anime. Maybe the advent of animation would enhance it, maybe the different anime genres could help expand and improve the story. Just go crazy with it.
• Link back to the original post (this post) so I can read people’s suggestions, I’d love to read everyone’s ideas.
• Include Make it Anime in your tags so everyone including myself can find them all easily.
• Nominate around 5-10 bloggers.

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So…making non-anime anime, huh? Welp, my non-anime knowledge only goes so far, but I’ll give it a shot. Since inevitably there will be people who won’t know something I’m talking about, I’ve put in links for almost everything I refer to…but if you don’t know something I haven’t linked, Google’s your friend.

For whatever reason, what came to mind first was this movie I studied years back for English, called Equilibrium.

Equilibrium 

With Ghost in the Shell and the like already in play, you could probably see an anime of this becoming a lot like Psycho Pass. Give an action anime a good studio and the fans will come back craving more, for one thing, and give a movie story a good fleshing-out and that’ll double the effects. Heck, throw in some Bullet Time for the ol’ Matrix homage and make us all laugh while you’re at it.

However, I do foresee a caveat – an anime of this would likely make low sales in the Japanese market and have to be at least partially funded by an American company, as historically that tends to happen with series like this (see The Big O, for example). Crunchyroll or Netflix, probably…I can’t see Amazon getting behind it.

Disclaimer: I have not seen The Matrix. Or Psycho Pass. I will get to both…someday. Maybe not on the same day.

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Back in the day where I bothered with novels more, I read a bunch of YA series which never seemed to stop…until they did stop, one day, like some long-running shonen have. So it was kind of hard to sift through my memories and try to pick a candidate for a book/series I remembered enough about, because I have a bunch I’ve only read bits of when I made the move to mostly manga.

However, I do remember one book freaking me out sometime in the past year or two…enough to spook the (very camera-shy) me into taking a photo of myself, just to make sure there was some evidence of me as I was at the time.

Now You See Me… (Emma Haughton)

If you think the last one was risky anime-wise, think about this one: A thriller-mystery, with all the potential and pitfalls of both genres. Both the thriller and the mystery anime genres are kind of lacking, since powerhouses of both genres (like Detective Conan or Boku Dake ga Inai Machi) cover everything well and sometimes the best mysteries crop up within multi-genre shows like Black Butler, so I figure a new entry wouldn’t hurt.

You’d need a good team on this one – I’d suggest the team that worked on Hyouka – for how visually stunning it could get and also for whoever’s skill was responsible for the foreshadowing. This one’s gonna need it. (That is, of course, should KyoAni bother in the first place.)

…Or, if someone really insists on being safe about things, they could just take the mystery route and run with it to produce an anime of BBC’s Sherlock (which I haven’t seen, but have read two novels from). There’s already a bilingual manga of it, the aforementioned novels and the show itself, so it’s a fantastic choice if you could scrounge up the rights to do so. You do you though, anime industry.

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At this point in the post, since I’m jumping backwards and forwards between honorable mentions and my actual choices a lot, I’ve realised I’ve done a lot of cross-media series since I’m throwing a bunch of ideas at the wall and seeing which ones I like best.

Since I’ve done the book and the movie, the TV show…welp, my mind only goes to the Western cartoons, since I can’t think of a good live-action TV show to save my life. MasterChef and the like are in the honorable mentions, my personal favourite The Amazing Race already has a cartoon version so an anime version would be redundant and…I can’t even bear to think of the shipping wars that would come out of a Beauty and the Geek anime…*shudders*

I honestly don’t know which one I know more about, since I only know of these series mostly in passing, but:

Miraculous Ladybug 

It’s no secret this thing was influenced by magical girl tropes and it was even pitched to Toei in anime format, only to evolve to what it is. So it’s not that big a jump to get an anime, although you’d somehow need to avoid rehashing what’s already occurred in the canon already. Whether that involve changing the protagonist or doing a different kind of story that could only exist in anime, I don’t know – I’ll leave that up to the anime staff.

Young Justice

Well, Teen Titans is anime-like enough to the point where it has its own chibi spinoff and a movie set in Japan, so I’ll go with the next best thing. Not to mention Young Justice is very plot-oriented and already has vaguely anime-esque designs as it stands, so it’s not that big a leap either. It would come off like a shonen, but wouldn’t be a shonen…

In fact, with the success of the various superhero movies in box offices worldwide and One Punch Man/Boku no Hero Academia, it actually sounds like a pretty good deal marketing-wise (Aquaman and Wonder Woman are mentor characters in Young Justice, for one thing).

(Please don’t do a chibi spinoff of either. I think Teen Titans Go! has already hogged enough spotlight, plus I think the number of chibi spinoffs we already have when it comes to anime is more than enough.)

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Honorable Mentions

• an Alex Rider anime (adapting from the books and/or the graphic novels, rather than having them be adapted by the author for the big screen), but as much as that has a bunch of source material to work from, people probably still remember that for the movie and all the fiddling with the source material that exists within that. It was a similar deal with I Am Number Four (which honestly had jumped the shark by the time it got to the second book of the second series, I think) and Maximum Ride.
• One of my candidates for making the main post was the series Daniel X, but it was too similar to a typical shonen that I thought it would bore those who like shonen (that’s much like how I felt with Eldlive, to be honest though). It’s a similar deal with The Power of Five, since I can only see that working as a long-running (yet convoluted) anime or set of movies in an anime style.
• anything that was an unadapted manga/comic/graphic novel/light novel, because the rules only said “book”. Average Joe probably meant “(standard) novel” but used it loosely enough to include those. I don’t know his real intent on that so I’ve stuck closely to the rules. I’d like anime Deadpool or Amulet, now that I think of it. Those would be fun ideas…
• Off the back of the previous dotpoint, a Spiderman ani–*opens Google* Wait, if there’s tokusatsu Spiderman, does that mean a Spiderman manga exists?…Yes! It does! Holy spiders, Batman! (Wrong hero, right exclamation, ha.) So, hypothetically speaking, Into the Spiderverse and Spiderman fans in general, you could have an anime! (I…think this might be the scariest one of all these ideas, to be honest. Because it’s probably one of the closest to being a reality.)
• an Iron Chef anime or one for a similar show, because that’s Shokugeki no Soma or another competitive cooking show…kind of…it depends on which anime and which TV show we’re talking about.

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Nominations

Since this focuses on non-anime media, I’ll try to tailor my nominations to people I know have enough love for both anime and non-anime media, plus aren’t on hiatus:

• Biblionyan
• Chizurue
• Jenn
• Arthifis
• …and because the theme of this post is “throwing ideas out and seeing if one sticks”, I’m kind of curious as to what sorts of things Cactus Matt might suggest for this…well, I did say I’d try to tailor those nominations, right?

Since this tag seems to be new, if you want to give this a shot, just give me a shout in the comments and I’ll ping you back in the section above.