The amount of anime to live-action adaptations has increased in recent years, with Netflix’s One Piece leading the game. Before that, it had a turbulent reputation with several failed adaptations, such as Netflix’s Death Note, the Attack on Titan film series, and Dragonball Evolution.
The main complaint against anime to live-action adaptations is how unfaithful they are towards the original source. Dragonball Evolution is a classic example of it since it was picked up by Hollywood and heavily Westernized, similar to Netflix’s Death Note.
However, even a well-received and high budget live-action series, like One Piece, isn’t doing real justice to its original anime. In the end, all of them look incredibly silly. It strips them from their true identity and end up looking rather cheap. No live-action has truly found a balance, not even One Piece.
Live-action adaptations will never match up to its original source
From the poster of Dragonball Evolution, we knew it would be a failure. From the American high school setting to the cast, nothing was correct. Justin Chatwin, the actor for Son Goku, even apologized to Akira Toriyama for it, recognizing how terrible the attempt was.
However, it’s not like producers in Hollywood learned from this failure. Netflix’s Death Note was an abomination, Ghost in the Shell was a mess, and let’s not forget how Netflix also butchered Cowboy Bebop, even Shinichiro Watanabe couldn’t watch a second of it.
Kazuhiko Torishima, the editor for the Dragon Ball series, blames Hollywood’s greed as well as Japan’s trust in the industry for the failure of these live-action adaptations. They thought this was the way to bring it to a global audience, despite Dragon Ball’s immense popularity.
The reasons behind the failure of Dragon Ball Evolution
🧵14/n pic.twitter.com/ucI210aajl
— Enomis (@Venixys) March 22, 2025
However, the anime community on Reddit doesn’t believe the Japanese entertainment industry can do a better job. This comment, in particular, is a skeptic and very critical of these live-action series.
Yes, there does need to be a balance between storytelling and character design. Sometimes, emulating the characters perfectly does result in looking like cheap cosplay. Attack on Titan, Rurouni Kenshin, and several other Japanese live-action attempts suffer from this.
Even successful live-action adaptations aren’t flawless
The One Piece live-action might have stolen many hearts for its faithful adaptation but some fans find it silly because of their costumes. Instead of being pirates, it’s more like they’re playing pirates. Here, it demonstrates the lack of balance the critical Reddit user was talking about.
So being too faithful to the point that their costumes make them look like cosplay is also “ridiculous.” Then how would any showrunner taking on the challenge of adapting these anime find a balance that works? Some aspects only translate well in an anime format and live-action proves it.
There’s probably no solid method for live-action adaptations to appease every fan. They cannot change the character designs without being unfaithful but then can’t tweak the storyline to fit a different design without doing the same. In the end, no live-action can be completely accurate.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
