Saikano, The Movie is set to release this month in Japan. I wrote about Saikano here in my Anime that Almost Made me Cry post. It’s a very sad Anime, but well produced. I was somewhat surprised to see it make a Live Action release though.

Saikano….she’s a war machine.

I’m noticing an increasing trend of Live Action Anime being produced both in Japan and here in the U.S. There’s the often talked about live action version of Neon Genesis: Evangelion on the way, and I mentioned the possibility of a Battle Angel Alita/GUNNm movie here. Japan has produced the aforementioned Saikano, as well as a live-action version of Cutie Honey and many others (including Devilman which starred famous American K1 fighter Bob Sapp).

So is this a trend that we can expect to see increase in the next couple of years? Will we see more and more of our favorite anime and manga acted out by real people? Do we really want to see that?

I guess you could say it’s similar to the influx of comic book based movies that have come out of Hollywood recently, but we all know that the live action versions haven’t really done their comic counterparts much justice. Spider Man and Batman are obviously the big winners with X-Men in the running (although I wouldn’t call the X-films all that great). For every successful live action comic movie there’s been 3 “relative” failures (Incredible Hulk, Constantine, Hellboy, Catwoman, Elektra, The Punisher, etc.). I think most Anime fans would rather see their favorite series left alone.

Edit: Although Hulk and Constantine were certainly not “flops”, I include them as relative “failures” because they didn’t dominate the box offices as expected. Many fans of the comics were also rather displeased with the movies

Tags for this posts: Anime, Manga, Saikano, Evangelion, Battle Angel, Devilman, Live Action

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