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And Now For The Ones You Know

Let’s keep it in line with the classics with Neon Genesis Evangelion. We already reviewed this case of hate it or love it, so we can leave the background aside and focus on the problem. The manga for Evangelion came a whole year before the show, but oddly enough the show is not an adaptation. Why? Because the manga was made in order to bring interest towards the show which was in production at the point of the manga’s release.

The big issue here is that since both came at relatively the same time the story line of one didn’t quite influence the other, so at first you got some minor differences and then a whole world of “What the hell?” The original anime ended its run in a miserable fashion, but the manga still runs as of 2010; although it’s less of “runs” and more of “it moves at the speed of a glacier made of frozen molasses”

The manga became a story of its own, presenting characters in such a different light and with personalities that varied so heavily from the anime that it felt like a whole new universe. One didn’t quite grasp the other, but that isn’t such a problem until a part of your head starts putting the pieces together and the thought of “They simply re-adapted the manga once the anime was over in order to satisfy the fans and make up for the flaws and crappy ending” sits with you.

The manga goes well beyond the quick and dirty anime by adding dialogues and sequences, changing the tone of the characters and altering some key moments from the anime that some viewers hated. It’s more of a correction than a parallel story or an adaptation. It also doesn’t matter much that it’s updated as slowly as to allow the “End of Evangelion” to be thrown into the manga’s plot way after the animated feature made its debut, pointing out that in a way you were just reading the story you wish you had watched.

It Isn’t Always The Anime’s Fault

Another show with a similar fate was School Days, the manga was meant as an adaptation of its own but its debut close to the anime turned sour once you could clearly compare the two. The original visual novel is, of course, miles away from its derived work. But the anime and manga that should have shared some common ground went on to be so different that the manga became equal parts crazy and disappointing.

It starts off as a romance, and it stays that way pretty much all the way to the last page where it seems to have remembered it was supposed to be dark. It ends in such an off throwing and odd way it simply seems like it was the product of a cash-in. The plot was decent up to when it tries to follow with the bad scenarios and twists that made the visual novel famous.

The anime managed to capture the development of the characters and the story up to a crescendo of death and despair in its short time, whereas the manga spent its time toying around with it until finally giving up and turning in an ending that feels completely out of the norm for what it had established up to that point.

Final Thoughts

Some adaptations suffer because the story doesn’t adapt well to its medium. Others due to the fact that the publishers and producers behind them don’t give much of a crap for the original work and seem to be keen on adding elements that will draw forth a given demographic. Manga tends to develop dialogues and plot lines and when it comes to action they tune it up with frantic sequences interjected with monologues lasting a few pages, whereas anime focuses on the action and then creates poorly executed breaks in the flow of things via a seemingly endless monologue “Why isn’t that guy punching the crap out of him instead of standing there listening?”

Adapting a story means to take the main elements from it, cutting the ones that would become unnecessary or get in the way and then polishing it up to better fit the particular medium in which it’s meant to be adapted into. In most cases, we get hit either by one of these big two issues; from manga to anime they tend to speedily adapt everything, skimming over dialogues and plot points and using filler to allow the manga to catch up.

Then once the anime is over we get the manga moving in an entirely new direction beyond what was showed in the anime and then the anime’s fans might end up feeling shorthanded. So why don’t they wait till the manga is over? It’s all about the Benjamin’s here. The anime usually hits during the peak of the manga’s popularity and as such it will come halfway through it and leave in the same fashion.

Anime to manga begins in the same line of the anime, and then goes along to add several layers of character development, dialogues and exposition to fill the pages of a bound volume. You’ll end up getting a long drawn out series of chapters to tell what happened in a single episode. Sometimes this does work but other times it just bores the anime’s fans. Not to mention that this sort of adaptation usually brings with it a brutal switch in art style depending on who they commission for the manga.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. Although the general feel of the article points towards manga/anime adaptations usually ending in disaster, they are not all that bad. It’s just very tricky to execute them well and in a way that they don’t feel as a mere cash-in. At the end of the day, the better ones can be thought of as a simple retelling or side-story meant to expand on the original. And if you don’t end up liking it, there’s always “The original was better”

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