Attack on Titan
The hottest, most trendy comic now in Japan may be Attack on Titan, which has sold totally more than 71 million copies. It has too much tremendous attractiveness to introduce at one time. I pick up only some of them today. Furthermore, I will mention a little about its remake into animation and live action.
PLOT & CHARACTERS
In a certain world, at a city surrounded by huge walls. 100 years ago, suddenly a lot of titans appeared and killed most humans on the earth. Remained humans constructed big walls to prevent the city from being attacked by titans. After that, for this 100 years, titans have never attacked people and the city was temporarily peaceful.
However, the brief peace is broken. All of a sudden, a titan of 50 meters taller than walls appears and destructs a part of walls. It allows many titans to enter human town, and the main character EREN’s mother is eaten and killed by one of them. Since then, Eren holds strong hatred against titans and decides to remove all of them in the world completely.
Eren and his old friends, a girl MIKASA and a boy ARMIN start to be trained in order to become warriors who beat titans. And finally, they become. But at the first battle, unfortunately, Eren is eaten by a titan. How hopeless.
In front of desperate Mikasa and Armin, a strange titan appears. It unexpectedly begins to attack and kill other titans. Helped by the weird titan, corps win. And from the body of it, Eren, assumed to be killed, comes out. It turns out that he has an ability to transform into a titan, though even Eren himself didn’t know the fact.
With powerful backup of Eren, human’s counter offensive against titans now begins. Through fights, people start to learn the mystery of titans.
APPEAL
Not just a fantasy action. It’s kind of mystery
If I have to define its genre, I might say a fantasy battle manga. But I believe it can be also said to be mystery. Of course, it is one of the most impressive scenes where people (Eren and other soldiers) fight against titans. However, what attracts strict readers most would be its detailed, and also mysterious story. Where do titans come from? Their true identity? What is the secret of walls? Why can Eren change into a titan? Is human’s enemy really titans…? All of these secrets get revealed as the story continues. (This series is not finished yet, but most truth is being brought to light now.) One of the astonishing things is the fact that the author Hajime Isayama has built the perfect, complete background history in depth since he first started the series.
Thus, this is not a simple action comic. You will be always surprised every time you face a new fact behind the story.
ANIMATION
Its animated series is also successful. The first reason would be the vigorous, gripping action sequences, which bring sort of high realistic sensation. As long as a novel or comic is made into animation, it should make full use of its advantage. True, this series has achieved the point. The scenes of battles are particularly amazing. It describes well the speed and the tensed feeling which are not depicted enough in the comic without move. In addition, it might be another factor that it respects the original’s world and doesn’t change almost the story from it.
LIVE ACTION
Even though the animated TV series has succeeded, the remake as a live action film was ended as failure. It also relates to the success of animation – the live action movie couldn’t describe powerful action nor the deep story. In the first place, Japanese live action film is not good at the description of fantasy at all. It tends to become cheap. What’s worse, because the original had not reached the crucial truth of the story at that point, the film couldn’t use it as the ending, and instead had to create its own development. That was terrible. Different from the original, it didn’t have any carefully plotted storyline. When it comes to the animated series mentioned above, it doesn’t need to finish within one or two episodes since it is sequel. So it can follow the original faithfully.
MY OPINION
Some source materials are good for live action movies. But you should know some others are not. It could be more ideal for an animated film rather than live action. You have to find out what your “baby” should be made into depending on each project.
