Certainly, Disney has been doing their best to kill the business concept of remaking successful cartoons using live actors. Anyone who has doubts about that might like to check out “The Critical Drinker” and his brutal takedown of Disney’s recent execrable “Snow White” (… but she is not White and no woman needs a prince).
However, maybe Disney’s problem is a Surfeit of Wokeness rather than the concept of the live action remake itself. I am an aficionado of the best of Japanese anime. For sure, most anime is just silly. But that media can soar! A key factor is the relative cheapness of anime – fairly simple drawings, rather low frame rate, no stars’ egos to massage, exotic locations are not an expense, not even any need to observe the Laws of Physics. As a result, the writer – the story-teller – becomes king. This is in stark contrast to that cruel Hollywood joke about bimbos and writers – the blonde would-be starlet was so dumb she slept with the writer.
A good example of the importance of the writer and the plot was the 2006 Japanese anime “Death Note”. The central plot device is that a bored shinigami, a Japanese God of Death, gave a young man a notebook in which anyone whose name was written would die. In the years since, this anime has spawned several offshoots and remakes, including (incredibly!) “Death Note – The Musical”.
In 2015, Japanese TV produced a live action remake of “Death Note” which stayed relatively close to the plot of the anime – using computer graphics to put the shinigami on screen. A God of Death gave a Death Note to a college student, who was initially rather reluctant to do anything with it. But when his police detective father’s life was in jeopardy, the college student used the Death Note to eliminate the criminal threatening to murder him. After that, the college student became obsessed with the idea that he could use the Death Note to create a world free from crime, and he began to eliminate evil-doers on an industrial scale.
This of course attracted the attention of the authorities, who set up a team to track down whoever was responsible – led by the college student’s detective father. They also brought in a strange young private detective, who immediately began to suspect the college student – thus setting off a whole string of plot twists, surprises, and betrayals.
Much of the interest in the story lies in its morally grey areas. Killing a criminal to stop a murder is one thing, but what about killing a convicted murderer whose sentence was inadequate? Or killing accused criminals before their trials? Or killing someone whose offence was groping a young woman? And then there is the issue of the responsibilities of fathers and sons to each other.
The core of the drama is the question of who is really delivering Justice. Is it the wielder of the Death Note who successfully reduces crime in Japan? Or is it the police and prosecutors who represent legal authority but are not able to stop crime? The contest between those two views of Justice can end only in tragedy.
My conclusion is that Disney-style plot-light Woke live action remakes are indeed a dead end. But adaptations of successful animes which keep the focus on the plot can be worthwhile.
