Is Live Action Dead?

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.

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You ask an interesting question. In a way it is asking just what IS “justice”. In many senses it is legal revenge. In your example, the “authorities” wield no less a Death Note; it merely has more hocus-pocus attached to it, giving it a veneer.

Notice that the media, usually in murder or rape cases, say that the victim or family got “justice” when the perpetrator is found guilty. ?But what is it that the victim/family really got. Some punishment, often apparently not enough for the pain and suffering caused by the perp. Often the only reasonable punishment as far as the victim is concerned, is death, allowing that perp to meet his maker and receive whatever justice is finally due.

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That is a good question about what constitutes “Justice”.

One logical answer would be that the wronged party gets made whole by the perpetrator – say, the citizen gets back his stolen car in its prior condition (or an equivalent replacement), paid for by the thief. For some unexplained reason, the legal system in the West or Japan delivers much less than that to the victim.

But what about the situation where being made whole is impossible – such as one’s spouse being murdered? Capital punishment for the perpetrator would be appropriate, but it would not bring back the murdered person, nor repair the damage done to that family. Contemporary “Justice” seems to focus on trying to redeem the perpetrator, while essentially ignoring the victim except as a possible witness in the “Justice” system’s legal games.

The wielder of the Death Note showed another path – make retribution so certain, so severe, and so fast that potential perpetrators are discouraged from criminal acts in the first place. In a sense, “Justice” then becomes a non-issue since there are no longer any crimes. But hey! it is only a story.

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A functioning society will acknowledge that criminals need to be removed from society and will prioritize removing them.

It isn’t good enough that a pick pocket gives the wallet back.

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One foundational principle (of many) the left forgets is that absence of a punishment component in the rule of law invites “self help”. A foreseeable result of DA’s not punishing such blatantly antisocial behavior will be vigilante intervention to fill the void. In that context, it may be that the public concludes that two wrongs can make it right.

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You do have a definition of “two wrongs”. Clearly in vigilantism there is a serious question in the minds of the people whether such action really IS a “wrong”. One might very well consider that the legal “system” ONLY EXISTS tp keep vigilantism from punishing the wrong person.

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