The translation of written stories in to movies is a seemingly natural progression. How many times have you had a favorite story, comic book, or manga that you would really like to see animated. How often, though, have we seen such translations and winced at things we felt were done wrong or treated poorly? However natural it may seem to transfer written (or drawn, in the case of manga) stories to film, there are some fundamental leaps that have to occur during this process which can result in a world of difference between the original story and the film based on it.
The most recent example is the feature-length film X, a two-hour movie that is based upon a manga series that is not even finished yet. While the manga and the movie could have the exact same ending, the amount of detail present into the manga cannot be squeezed into the film. The result is an abbreviated version of the story. As long as the salient points get carried across, the translation can be considered faithful, right?
If only it were that simple. The first issue in adapting or translating a story from one medium to another is determining the most important parts of the story. If the person doing the adaptation is not the original author, and if the original author never explicitly stated "yes, this person's death is the reason for the story" then anything done by the translator is based on that person's understanding and interpretation of the original work. This chasm between the author's intent and the interpretation creates potential problems.
In addition, the medium itself presents problems. Written word relies upon whole experiences in the reader to convert what they are reading in to a series of images in their mind. Although manga has images to assist the reader, things such as voice, color, and how some actions may actually occur are left up to the reader to determine. Again the manga artist relies upon a more or less common framework on the reader's part to be able to reconstruct the story out of the individual frames and word balloons.
The next issue is one of time. Many stories that are attractive to animate are also fairly long in one way or another. This is how these stories build setting, characters, plot twists. Novels and manga are not necessarily limited by time, but a motion picture certainly is. When converting a story to a film, time restrictions often force directors to leave out some important sequences in the interest of keeping the movie under two hours.
Many of these problems are actually generic to the translation of any story from almost any medium to another. From movie to written word, from written word to illustration, even from one speaker to another in an oral tradition.
There are a number of examples of the above: X, AKIRA, MAISON IKKOKU, VIDEO GIRL AI to name a few. Some were greater successes than others. Some of these perhaps did better than their written counterpart, even though they may have diverged drastically from the original material.
X and AKIRA were both movies based on manga. Both movies were made before the manga was completed. In X the story that draws us in on each character and gives them life had to be drastically abbreviated. The tricks in the story that made us forget the dreadful clock of fate ticking down the seconds to a certain doom had to be left out in order to fit the movie in to a two hour length. No time for subtlety here: get the story together, make sure they understand how things got to the end. Then of course, there is the possibility that the manga, which has not yet ended, will have a totally different ending.
AKIRA shared a similar fate. Much of the background of the characters was sacrificed to make the two-hour movie. And the film version had a much different (and much more inexplicable) ending. Fans of AKIRA praise the movie as being a feat of animation, but find the end somewhat enigmatic.
When a story is translated not in to movie, but in to a television or OVA series, there is a greater chance for more faithful adherence to the story; conversely, there is also a greater chance for equal divergence. There is a certain desire when reading a comic to see it animated exactly as written in the comic. If we are going to go through all the work to animate a story that is episodic and can have new stories added why not add stories that were not in the comic? GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI did this, as did the series RANMA ½, with moderate to good success.
Sometimes a series will try to remain faithful to the manga, even if the no end is in sight, as in Takada Yuuzo's SAZAN EYES. The OVA could have had a neat ending that closed the series, but instead it was faithful to the manga, leaving the viewer holding on to their seat in frustration wanting to know what happens next. Sometimes, of course, the OVA will instead try to wrap things up at the end of its run instead of leaving things hanging. The VIDEO GIRL AI OVA series drastically diverges from the manga at the end, giving the viewer the impression of a happy ending to the story, while the manga reader is left anguished at the same point in the story as the lead character stands screaming in a roadway.
Divergence and change are not always detrimental, as shown by "Magnetic Rose," the first segment in Otomo Katsuhiro's movie MEMORIES. Based on an original story by Otomo, the movie version is longer, explains more of the characters' motivations, provides more of their past, and, ultimately, delivers a stronger punch because of it.
Some efforts would seem totally fraught with the possibility of a poor translation but succeed despite these odds. Miyazawa Kenji's NIGHT ON THE GALACTIC RAILROAD, was adapted from adapted from a novel filled with myth and symbolism into a movie that is widely accessible and touches the hearts of those who watch it. A lot of liberties and creative solutions had to be applied to the film to attempt to keep the character of the story while making it work as a film. People may disagree as to whether or not the film carried off a good translation, but it certainly did try and received a lot of acclaim.
In the end is this translation effort worth it? Is the stretching and pulling and cutting and adapting worth the work and the difficult decision making? Yes! Stories are meant to be told. Adapting stories has roots in our oral traditions. When viewers watch a film such as X, they experience a particular team effort to adapt a story they found worthwhile to suit their storytelling format. Maybe this will reveal something new about the story, such as new episodes that did not occur in the original material, or twists that affect the experience such as making the main characters of NIGHT ON THE GALACTIC RAILROAD cats instead of humans. Casting aside one's preconceived notions of what the film should be is the key to enjoyment.