It was a funny coincidence when I spotted the Loups-Garous anime on fansub so soon after I’d bought a copy of the original novel. I was interested to see how the transition would go since the book’s an atmospheric and moody piece; the adaptation of Kyogoku’s Mouryou no Hako went through a couple of episodes where the wheels fell off for a while but it was still really disappointing to see Loups-Garous stumble so badly. I wish the staff who had worked on MnH had been given the chance to work on this one too, because that worked far better on screen than this did.

The novel laid the philosophy on quite thick but fortunately there’s enough going on in there to make for a decent movie from the SF and conspiracy-thriller aspects without exploring anything else too deeply. I actually think the film would’ve been bogged down with Kyogoku’s long-winded intellectual musings but even with a more digestible narrative it still falls flat and, oddly, seems to be aimed at a somewhat different audience from the source material.