Unfilmable

[krinndnz]

I reread Anathem just recently (so good!). I'm reminded that probably a lot of my love for writing clever people bickering is from Neal Stephenson. He writes about the kind of person I want to be/become/know; for good or for ill, he writes about people like that in Interesting Times. Not a bad role model as writers go. The thing is, as I reread

Comments

[masstreble]

Well, you already brought up Dahl, so, I have nothing to add

[krinndnz]

I wish to note that now I'm actually reading A Scanner Darkly, and it's quite good but gets more difficult to read as it goes along.

[tangyabominy]

Most manga and comics, I think, are unfilmable, though they are frequently filmed. By their very nature they're often long-running, sprawling, intricate things: try to compress that into the standard budget you have for an anime series, or worse, a 2-hour movie, and the end result is often horribly garbled.

I recently watched the anime adaptation of a manga that I really rather like. The manga is, for being essentially a gay romance with heavy BDSM undertones, actually fairly literary, layered and clever. The anime is a huge steaming pile of unresolved mysteries topped off with "someone we thought was good might actually be evil! Or might not be. We're not really sure. The End."

I must admit, I sound horribly lowbrow here, but Anathem sounded fascinating and wonderful to me as a concept yet I had a hard time reading it. I think that because of the vaguely ADD-ish way that I read, there are certain narrative styles that are very difficult for me to get through. It's really a shame. :(

[krinndnz]

Other comment later - but Anathem is certainly a book that will punish you for skimming or for starting in the middle.

Speaking of possibly fundamentally unfilmable things, this is probably a good place to mention Alan Moore, who I kind of imagine drinking himself into a stupor every time another of his works that he doesn't own the rights to gets made into a movie. Speaking of deep weirdness connected to a creator's work ...

[bossgoji]

Yeah. Admittedly, Watchmen did a phenomenal job of adapting the story, but Moore threw a fit because Moore is basically the Aleister Crowley of the comics world.

[bossgoji]

Either that, or the opposite problem happens, and the production schedule of an anime far overtakes the manga it's based on, leading to filler produced by different writers, which ruins the auteur feel most manga possess. Sometimes studios will take this is an interesting direction and create a completely different ending(BONES is notorious for doing this, most notably with the original FMA anime and Soul Eater), but more often than not otherwise excellent productions become bogged-down in unending narrative sandbagging and meaningless side-arcs(Bleach, I am looking at you).

[conrad_zaar]

I didn't know that Dahl hated Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, although I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Do you know specifically what his objections were?

I remember reading Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator a few years after Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It was an extraordinary discovery: I had no idea that Dahl had written a sequel, and I loved it. I reread it last summer, however, and didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I expected to.

[krinndnz]

I have no idea what his specific objections were, sorry. If I had to guess, it'd be about the changed ending?

But both works have in some respects aged poorly. I'm okay with that, overall, while still accepting that the heavy-handedness was equal to the task of getting my younger self to notice the editorializing at all.

[krinndnz]

I keep meaning to read Banks, and haven't! Where would you recommend starting ?

[krinndnz]

Hah! Ha ha, ha ha. Very clever, and now I see that too in it. Fucking Reagan.