Hollywood's Involvement in Anime: Good Or Bad?

[flying ^]

Originally Posted by MakubeX2

PS :- Is the western live action take of Evangelion still on ?

here's the last update on that project...

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news...t-still-active

[brocko]

ergh... that was like over a year ago and considering that it's been in production hell for the last half decade or so i don't think we'll actually be seeing it anytime soon or ever at all... =/

[Taufiq91]

Originally Posted by brocko

ergh... that was like over a year ago and considering that it's been in production hell for the last half decade or so i don't think we'll actually be seeing it anytime soon or ever at all... =/

Well, it is still happening under WETA and Gainax's supervision, and you know what?

I'm actually okay with an Evangelion adaptation/remake.

I mean, Rebuild of Evangelion turned Evangelion into an "open source material" ala gundam would still be good if they keep the basics of the series intact.

And unlike DBZ and Akira, Evangelion has a universal theme that could be adapted into any situation. The themes of Evangelion are pretty universal that you could remake it into Turkish and still be as good as the original.

However, you do need an actor like Jamie Bell to be Shinji, not Daniel Radcliffe(they're still going for him).

[MakubeX2]

Chances of anything involving giant robots with deep conspiracy elements isn't exactly going to appeal to mainstream audience.

I'd rather they go for something like Gunslinger Girls, a drama with all the sci-fi elements sidelined.

[Taufiq91]

Originally Posted by MakubeX2

Chances of anything involving giant robots with deep conspiracy elements isn't exactly going to appeal to mainstream audience.

Um....District 9 anyone?

[MakubeX2]

Originally Posted by Taufiq91

Um....District 9 anyone?

That isn't a big budget mainstream release, is it ?

Something like Evangelion will require production values equivalent to say, Avatar for it to appease the fanboy. Else, it will be rendered to the same pits as G-Saviour.

And to make a profit out of said production values require the project to be able to appeal to the mainstream viewers.

[Taufiq91]

Originally Posted by MakubeX2

That isn't a big budget mainstream release, is it ?

Something like Evangelion will require production values equivalent to say, Avatar for it to appease the fanboy. Else, it will be rendered to the same pits as G-Saviour.

And to make a profit out of said production values require the project to be able to appeal to the mainstream viewers.

But WETA does DIstrict 9 with a $30 Million and it looks way better than in Avatar.

Infact, Advent Children was done in $15 Million and also looks better than Avatar.

[brocko]

Yea District 9 was made with a relatively small budget and the CG still looked great, which leads me to think that most of the production costs goes towards the big name actors (and perhaps even extended to directors too) instead.

I'll be relatively happy with decent no-name actors if that means more money gets pooled into improving other parts of the movie instead.

Originally Posted by Taufiq91

Well, it is still happening under WETA and Gainax's supervision, and you know what?

Last i heard, it was majoritively ADV trying to push the project along and since they went bust some time ago, it probably wasn't a good development for the project Then again i never really did follow the project too closely anyway and they might've passed it onto Gainax before ADV stepped away from the ring.

[Kagayaki]

There's no reason for an EVA movie to need an Avatar style budget.

CGing metal robots and giant monsters is easy, and that's all they'd have to do for EVA. The reason Avatar was so hard to CG was because you had humanoid characters and living creatures everywhere. I mean, if you go and compare the Avatar and Advent Children trailers, there's a noticeable difference in things like the expressiveness of CG characters' facial expressions (which were motion captured in all scenes for Avatar, but in Advent Children they only motion captured some parts of the fight scenes). Also, the reflective quality of the skin and the realism of hair and fabric are dramatically better in Avatar (which are the hardest things to CG realistically).

Similarly, District 9 had aliens without humanlike faces, skin and hair. This is why it could look good with a small budget.

EVA has no CG main characters whose facial expressions, hair, and skin need to be realistic, so they can get away with a budget much more like District 9.

Also, EVA takes place on earth, so they could use real footage for landscape scenes, rather than CGing impossible floating landscapes from scratch (forests, grass, etc. are hard to CG in a photorealistic way).

[Progbuusters]

speaking of Avatar, was Cameron going to make Battle Angel?

[flying ^]

Originally Posted by Kagayaki

There's no reason for an EVA movie to need an Avatar style budget.

no movie will rake in $$$ like avatar if you don;t go full-3D

EVA live should go 3D or scrap it

[Kagayaki]

Originally Posted by Progbuusters

speaking of Avatar, was Cameron going to make Battle Angel?

He said he was, but I don't think he's going to get to it anytime soon, if ever. It would be pretty technically challenging to do right, so he's either waiting for new technologies, or just got distracted by other projects.

[MakubeX2]

Originally Posted by Kagayaki

There's no reason for an EVA movie to need an Avatar style budget.

CGing metal robots and giant monsters is easy, and that's all they'd have to do for EVA.

What about the fortress that is Tokyo-3 and the natural underground bunker of Geofront ? And of course the interiors such as the EVA Hangars and Terminal Dogma. All these had to be done from scratch as there are no real life counterparts.In short, you will need to recreate a World from scratch.

And the EVA units are not merely robots and fans will want them to move like the artifical humanoids that they are. So motion capture is essential. And the ending sequence of Episode 9 will burn quite a huge hole in the budget should they dare to venture in mimicking it in live action sequence.

Of course there are other factors that need to take into accounts such as the enviromental damage amongst the other special effects.

Which bring us to one of the reason of why anime live action adaption gets the shabby treatment in Hollywood. Most of the settings are next to impossible to recreate faithfully unless quite a few Studio Executive are feeling generous, but Anime being the niched genre that it still is......

[Akito Kinomoto]

I have come to accept the fact that America and Japan should stick to what they're good at instead of doing anything derived from the other nation.

[Taufiq91]

Originally Posted by MakubeX2

What about the fortress that is Tokyo-3 and the underground natural underground bunker of Geofront ? And of course the interiors such as the EVA Hangars and Terminal Dogma. All these had to be done from scratch as there are no real life counterparts.In short, you will need to recreate a World from scratch.

And the EVA units are not merely robots and fans will want them to move like the artifical humanoids that they are. So motion capture is essential. And the ending sequence of Episode 9 will burn quite a huge hole in the budget should they dare to venture in mimicking it in live action sequence.

Of course there are other factors that need to take into accounts such as the enviromental damage amongst the other special effects.

Which bring us to one of the reason of why anime live action adaption gets the shabby treatment in Hollywood. Most of the settings are next to impossible to recreate faithfully unless quite a few Studio Executive are feeling generous, but Anime being the niched genre that it still is......

You can still make Tokyo-3 under $40 Million .

it's WETA.

[Guernsey]

I don't know if I want to see a live action EVA, the DBZ moive left a bad taste in my mouth and it looked like they didn't even read the manga at all. Even the Watchmen movie (a Western made graphic novel series) was terrible storywise, none of the characters had anytime to breathe and it seemed to focused on the action rather than content of the story. I am beginning to understand why moore hates Hollywood so much. I fear the same for any anime or show of any medium being adapted into a Hoolywood movie epsecially with that anime =/= cartoon =/= childish mentality,

[AnimeFan188]

A new article on the subject:

Hollywood Sci-Fi Films Are Ripping Off Anime:

"Transcendence’s tale about cybernetic potentiality is ingenious, but it was also
done 16 years ago. Hollywood has been borrowing liberally from Japan’s anime and
manga past."

See:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...off-anime.html

[Sackett]

Originally Posted by Taufiq91

True.

I mean, it's basically the same as America using Iraqi oil rigs, or Wal-Mart & other US companies using Chinese labour. It's only gonna benefit the former, not the latter.

Except that both those scenarios clearly do benefit the latter as well as the former. Quite significantly too.

Free will contracts are almost always beneficial to both parties, otherwise one of the parties would not have agreed.

I see a lot of reasoning in this thread that is basically along the lines of feeling that cooperation between anime companies and Hollywood will not produce media we want, and therefor it is bad for the industries. I tend to agree that most of the current cooperation has not produced media that I care for, but I recognize that much of it is beneficial to the industry.

Anime needs to expand it's consumer base. If that means adapting popular Western media franchises then so be it. Hopefully this exposure will then allow the expansion of the anime fanbase for more traditional anime.

[ScumbagYoshii]

Um...not gonna touch on much, but I think there's a pretty big misconception that needs to be addressed here:

The Matrix was more inspired by Neuromancer by William Gibson (which also inspired Ghost in the Shell) than Ghost in the Shell. Even if people say that they were "inspired by GitS", the amount of references in The Matrix to the novel is by far more prominent than GitS.

Hence the track, Mona Lisa Overdrive?

The article that was linked above is also absurdly misleading, because anime is not at the forefront of producing:

weird and wonderful visions of a future ruled by technology and dubious morals.

The author has either never read a sufficient amount of science fiction novels to know that he is wrong or he is just purposefully ignoring a vast repository of [superior] content.

[GundamZZ]

Originally Posted by AnimeFan188

A new article on the subject:

Hollywood Sci-Fi Films Are Ripping Off Anime:

"Transcendence’s tale about cybernetic potentiality is ingenious, but it was also
done 16 years ago. Hollywood has been borrowing liberally from Japan’s anime and
manga past."

See:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...off-anime.html

It's even, then. In the past, many anime and manga constantly used idea from Hollywood movies. Some manga even openly admit it in the story.

Hollywood is known for reinvent itself every decade or so. Anime and manga may have the similar tendency. It would be nice if Hollywood can master the camera view as anime's moving angle. It would be wild.