Can I talk for a moment about visual storytelling, cause, I feel like it’s something that a lot of adaptations forget about in lieu of trying to replicate their source material.
It’s a problem you see most often in anime derived from manga or light novels, but it’s also present in movies based on YA novels, and you gotta know what I’m talking about, start on black, opening narration, fade in as the main character explains the world and environment. This works in a book since the reader can’t see anything, they need the specifics of the world explained, but it feels like the movies are just like “well it worked for the book, it’ll work for us right?
I’d say it’s worse in anime, where characters will go on long internal soliloquies trying to explain their thought processes and complex emotions, which again, works for the manga, in a manga movement is very expensive, every single motion requires it’s own panel, which takes up the artist’s time, printed space, and a moment in the narrative, so it’s important to only show what absolutely needs to be shown. But animation is different, it’s all movement and the details are what sells it more than the dialogue.
The reason I wanted to make this post is because of one scene in One Punch Man that perfectly exemplifies how to translate a written thought process into visual storytelling. After getting punched to the moon (err, spoilers), Saitama has this thought process
and it’d be easy to translate that entirely literally in the anime, Saitama crouches, has an internal monologue as he tries to figure out how much force he needs to put into his jump, and then he launches. Instead though, the scene is done completely silently, to sell the fact that he’s in space, but the thought process isn’t removed, it’s just show visually.
He throws a bit of moon rock to gauge the moon’s gravity, then launches, it’s a much more thoughtful approach to the scene and the audience’s ability to interpret visual information.
I just, really wish more adaptations realized the inherent strength of the visual medium instead of relying entirely on the source material’s structure and reliance on its own medium.
Ech, my history teacher support Clinton and was trying to justify the voting fraud inter favor by going like who writes election doesn’t have voting fraud as though that makes it okay. I want to vomit
Imagine My Immortal but written in the style of Shakespeare.
SCENE 1. A MAGIC SCHOOL CALLED HOGWARTS IN ENGLAND
Enter ENOBY
ENOBY
For truth, that which the gods have christened me Has many parts, like these locks, flow’n from my crown. That hellish sound, which forms mine name, sprung from The dusky shades of these roots, so like the stone But broken, rent, mottled; for, like the flames That hie from Hades, the dusk is split with peals Of cold violet, the shade of icy fangs Met with military scarlet; coils not But hangs; not ragged, but lustrous, set off Like a precious jewel made more pure by the Barren winds of silent winter deserts, So are not these jewels of mine own self-crown Brought forth in splendour so close to these eyes Frozen, as glaciers, forged by an artist Who, bereft of artisan tools, gives himself And sculpts his godly business with that Which the muses draw blindly from his vision. Thus sorrow, reflected twice in these mirrors, Casting mine eyes as icy limpid tears.
Imagine Shakespeare but written in the style of My Immortal
Hi my name is Hamlet and I have long blond hair that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like the sun god Apollo (AN: if u don’t know who he is get da hell out of here!). I’m not related to him but I wish I was because he’s a major fucking hottie. My mother married my uncle after my father died. I have pale white skin. I’m also a student, and I went to a school called Wittenberg in Germany but I just graduated. I’m a prince (in case you couldn’t tell) but I wear mostly black bc I’m in mourning. I For example today I was wearing a black doublet with matching lace around it and a black tights, white undershirt and black boots. I was with my mother and Horatio. We were standing inside Elsinore. It was snowing and raining so there was no sun, which I was very happy about. My uncle Claudius stared at me. I put up my middle finger at him.
