Personally, I cannot help but be fascinated by the attempts to adapt something into another medium in the name of gaining it respect, with my fascination only equaled by the amount of failures to get projects going. I mean, once upon a time someone optioned a live-action Ranma ½. How different would the world be if that got made during the height of the teen sex comedy? Or if that Evangelion film actually got made?
Well, it's really more about what each medium is better suited for. Live-action is better suited for realistic material with dramatic lighting and camera angles, while animation is better suited for fantasy worlds with cartoony proportions. That's not to say live-action can't do fantasy worlds and animation can't do realism, just that it's easier to film a real set or location than it is to make a fantasy one, and creating a fantasy world in animation is the same level of difficulty as creating a realistic world.
Yes, this. People were generally on board with The Witcher (2019), for example, because the realism and Low Fantasy setting of the books and games transitioned well to live action. And that's one entry in the attempt to find the next Game of Thrones.
Hmm, are there live-action versions of fantasy cartoons that have actually worked?
Edited by Synchronicity on Feb 20th 2021 at 5:05:15 AM
Another example of how the mediums differ: children and animals in live-action are infamously hard to work with, so most live-action movies/tv shows tend to go with teenagers and CGI monsters, respectively. Children and animals are a lot more common in animation because kids can just be voiced by adults and no-one cares, and animals can look just as cartoony as the other characters. Trying to CGI up realistic animals for live-action is a nightmare because people know what those animals look like and won't be fooled by a poor facsimile, while CGI monsters can look much less realistic and still be believable in live-action.
The idea of not only this massive spectacle but showing the story to an audience that would otherwise be completely dismissive of a "kids show" is also why people want to adapt these stories.
Let's be blunt. Even if people are willing to give animation a chance, which is an increasing but hardly universal demographic among adults, a lot of people see that Nickelodeon logo and turn their noses up, thinking "kids show." By making it a live-action show, on Netflix, you get to tell that story to an audience that would otherwise never bother with it.
While I don't think this adaptation will be good, I disagree with the claim that a live-action adaptation cannot be good. The highest-grossing film franchise of all time right now is a pretty stark counterargument against the idea that a story being overly fantastic would prevent it from looking good in live-action.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.![]()
Yeah, but the original series actually was a kid's show. It was about kids made for kids who occasionally fight other kids. Yeah, there's genocide, war, spirituality, and fighting but there's also poop jokes, cute animals, life lessons that are on the nose, and just plenty of moments of the main characters being kids.
Adults turning up their noses to a hugely popular animated show like Avatar isn't really that big of a deal because they weren't really the target audience. That's one of the reasons why the live action show would have been better off focusing on adults.
Another reason is that despite the target audience being originally for kids, ironically most Avatar fans actually are adults now. On some level, I can see why Netflix would want to make a newer live-action version that appeals to a new generation of kids, but there would be so many other options that would invite new and old fans.
Then again, Teen Titans Go! is proof that you can take a good beloved product and repackage it for a new generation and make more money than you ever made off of the original.
Edited by deuteragonist on Feb 20th 2021 at 4:14:21 AM
Oh it can look good. But it can also look mediocre. Sometimes we can get a colorful and stylish Thor Ragnarok, other times a gray and flat Doctor Strange. And one could argue the most successful animated Marvel venture blows them all out of the water. And that’s with movies many times the budget of Netflix films. So my doubts for this one are high.
Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 20th 2021 at 4:45:29 AM
I don't think a live action adaptation of a cartoon or comic is bad out of hand, but it does take some hard work to adapt well. You have to understand both mediums, for one, to create a great adaptation from one to the other. I suspect this is where many adaptations falter to begin with.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesIt'll be better we had just gotten a live-action Korra movie. The 20th century buildings and vehicles should be a lot easier to play with than a fully CGI Appa who must be featured in almost every Avatar episode because he's the team's mode of transportation.
Plus, it has the bonus of casting actors in their 20s rather than as kids or teenagers.
And Korra's story is the one that would benefit the most from a rewrite, given all the issues with its rushed plots thanks to its Troubled Production.
Are. You. HIGH?
It may not be garishly 80s neon and loud like Ragnarok, but grey and flat are literally the opposite of Doctor Strange.
I'm completely serious when I say that Doctor Strange looked flat and gray. Nearly every interior scene in the sanctums was a muddy brown blur, and the hospital scenes were muted gray like a commercial for medication. Scenes that should've popped like Dormammu's dimension were saturated so dark purple that most of the Kirby-esque details were lost, and the transforming cities a blue-grey blur in the day and gray-black at night. It was frankly quite disappointing.
The same cinematographer on Strange went on to work on Captain Marvel and that movie at least looked decent on outdoor scenes, but inside spaceships and houses everything got needlessly dark, and it was very noticeable they did not know how to light Lashana Lynch and Samuel Jackson in dark settings. On the whole much of the MCU (which I like and can forgive its flaws) has issues with drab lighting and flat color saturation, with a few exceptions like Ragnarok, but it stands out most in films like Doctor Strange where the visuals should be immensely trippy.
Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 20th 2021 at 7:05:21 AM
I agree that non-black people generally don't care to learn how to properly light black people in film. It's terrible, and it's been a part of the film and photography industries since their inception. (Yes, institutionalized, even if subconscious, racism built right into the history of image reproduction technology. If you doubt me, study the technology. Study film history.)
A photographer once "jokingly" asked me to lighten up my skin tone. I'm a lawyer, and was attending a conference of progressive lawyers.
He did not stay employed by the conference much longer.
Edited by wanderlustwarrior on Feb 20th 2021 at 9:40:07 AM
The sad, REAL American dichotomyAccording to IMDb
, he isn't on Doctor Strange 2 but he is on Eternals.
It's a problem bigger than one person and there are other MCU films have cinematography issues in smaller doses (like even Endgame saturating the final battle a little too dark). I will say this, WandaVision looks really good. The outdoor nighttime scenes have great contrast, and they know how to transition the cinematography style from era to era and subtly switch to modern forms when the show goes "off the script".
Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 20th 2021 at 7:52:57 AM
It's also hardly the sort of problem limited to just the MCU, a lot of big budget movies tend to suffer from those sorts of issues.
If anything a lot of older movies were worse, as they put big C Gi sequences at night to try and hide the fact the C Gi is crap.
Rememeber how the first Hulk movie had its climax take place both at night and underwater?
Might ask well put a warning on screen telling everyone to put a blindfold on.
Edited by HailMuffins on Feb 20th 2021 at 1:08:41 PM
So this has been bothering me; remember Chit Sang? That inmate who helped with the breakout in "The Boiling Rock," joined the Gaang for two seconds and was promptly forgotten about?
We never find out what he was in for. Considering it was a maximum security prison, maybe he was there for a really good reason.
Also, in response to this;
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure they didn't call it the Hundred Years War in the show — they'd say "We've had a hundred years of war" and the like, but never as a proper name. We didn't hear "The Hundred Years War" until Korra's time.
Edited by drac0blade on Feb 20th 2021 at 9:02:17 AM

Dude, it's a live-action remake of a fantasy cartoon.
It was never gonna be good because a cartoon is already a more fitting medium to tell this sort of story in the first place.