“By changing your viewpoint just a bit, you can see familiar things in a whole new light. It happens a lot. And really works.”
I’ve no idea what’s up with the current fad for live-action adaptations of anime and manga these days, although I’m pretty excited about the feature-length effort of Solanin. The thing is, it’s so easy for me to imagine how well Inio Asano’s graphic novels can make the jump from paper to big screen since he has such a keen eye for scene composition and, to coin a hackneyed phrase, a finger on the pulse on what makes ordinary ‘real life’ people tick. He captures snapshots of everyday life events with the flair of a skilled photographer; What a Wonderful World! pre-dates it by several years but the intentions, and end results, are similar.
I’m always wary of spin-offs and retellings that aren’t done by the original writer or artist; particularly so when the story is one of my personal favourites. As much as I admire Makoto Shinkai’s Hoshi no Koe OAV I’ve always felt it had some room for improvement, but wasn’t sure whether anyone else could recreate what made it so special. There’s no denying that it was a tantalisingly short piece in the first place, which is all part of its charm really, but I was still intrigued by what could be done in a different format without the restrictions imposed on the film that it’s based on.
“As I was watching Evangelion, up until about the fourteenth episode, I remember thinking ‘Ahh! Everything I’ve always wanted to do has been done! I don’t have to do anything any more! Anno and his crew have done it all for me!’” admits Hiroki Endo, in the Afterword to the first volume of Eden: it’s an endless world!, as he shares his thoughts on how certain titles set the standard but at the same time can never capture your own individual emotions and ideas. I know exactly where he’s coming from: had everyone resigned to the notion that there would never be anyone to top Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton might have thrown in the towel and Stevie Ray Vaughan may never have bothered either. How could the evolution of guitar music ever continue?
I must admit that I’m not a huge fan of horror stories; they’re often derivative and/or dumb teen-orientated efforts so it takes a real classic of the genre to get my attention. I much prefer something more psychological than supernatural anyway because the nature of what’s frightening is more convincing – generally speaking the closer it is to reality, the scarier I find it to be. I’ve 