No./14 Hollywood’s anime boom explained
From The Lord Of The Rings to Blade Runner, the animation style is re-energising familiar worlds
EARLY IN THE anime short ‘T0-B1’ from the anthology Star Wars: Visions, a robot boy takes a literal leap into his own imagination. In a seamless shot, he crosses the boundary between the real world and fanciful drawings, changing his own shape and the textures around him. Through anime — a style of animation, originating from Japan, that generally features big action, big emotion and highly stylised characters — director Abel Góngora reimagines classic Star Wars mythology via Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy. The iconography is familiar, but the imagery is new. And now Góngora is set to lead a new anime adaptation of Scott Pilgrim for Netflix, executive-produced by Edgar Wright.
Those are just two of the many iconic Western properties being reimagined in this way, in a wave largely driven by Japanese and
Korean studios. There’s also Blade Runner: Black Lotus, which debuted last November, an La-set spin-off that draws on the visuals of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic, swapping Rick Deckard for a female replicant . “Advanced technology is such a hallmark of
[Blade Runner], so telling a story through cutting-edge CG feels highly apropos,” says Sarah Victor, a series production executive. She adds that “expansive world-building plays to animation’s strengths”.
Also getting the anime treatment: feature film The Witcher: The Nightmare Of The Wolf, monster-centric series Pacific Rim: The Black, and adaptations of Tomb Raider and Skull Island (all courtesy of Netflix). Then there’s The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim, due in April 2024. A feature-length anime set 250 years before the original trilogy, The War Of The Rohirrim will serve as a companion piece to Peter Jackson’s films, telling the story of Rohan king Helm Hammerhand, and presumably featuring plenty of wild equine action. Jason Demarco, executive producer on the film and an anime head at Warner Bros. Animation, promises that going 2D will give Middle-earth a whole new kick. “There’s a level of freedom that comes with the idea that we are translating Tolkien’s concepts into something as ‘simple’ as drawings that move,” he says. “In a way, I feel it brings us back to the purity of playing inside our imaginations.” And that’s where the beauty lies in these new takes on old stories. Skull Island’s monsters can become even more outlandish. The Ride Of The Rohirrim from The Return Of The King might soon look like a day at Ascot by comparison. Anime can open up familiar worlds in thrilling new ways; as long as respect is shown to what we love about those worlds in the first place.