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narcasseI preface this by saying that I’ve still not finished reading the manga and that I find the anime so hysterical that I can’t actually watch it seriously. So when it came to the live action movie I wasn’t really expecting all that much, especially when comparisons to things like the Sailor Moon live action came to mind. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised when both films turned out to be rather well done pieces.
The film version differed from the manga since the story was truncated and presumably it differs from the anime too, though I can only confirm that he endings of all three play out slightly differently. What struck me most about the films were the way that certain things that I’d completely bypassed in the manga suddenly made sense.
This is a very petty revelation but it’s only in the live action that things like Light’s haircut and colour as well as his constant studying made sense. His hair had always baffled me but I’d put it down to the sort of dynamics that tend to occur in manga: in the live action it suddenly struck home that it’s just a longer version of that same haircut that every Oriental guy has to have at least once as some kind of right of passage. Usually we all have it at shorter lengths and I did myself have it at a shorter length than any of my friends but it is essentially the same style: Light just wears it much, much longer than is the norm. Likewise, his hair colour isn’t actually anything drastic and is in fact just a more conservative version of ‘Hong Kong orange’ since it’s darker than the norm. And once again I’ve had hair bleached to that shade myself, as well has having had it ash blond at one point because I was in my early twenties and it’s something of a right of passage.
Similarly Light’s constant studying isn’t anything beyond the norm in so far as when you’re in the run up to exams you really are expected to, if not study, at least go to your room for extended periods of time and make studying motions. Gone are my father’s day when he’d actually have to study at the table with his brothers, under the watchful gaze of grandfather or the monks who ran the boarding school: these days you just go to your room, close the door and get on with it. You don’t even really have to study for solid blocks of time as long as you keep to your room. You can go online, read, even potentially just take a nap: as long as you’re in your room and there’s a revision timetable up somewhere accompanied by the relevant study materials those five hours are fair game. You can even have friends around because regardless of what you’re actually doing, in Oriental parental terms it’s a study group. I’ve sat in the rooms of friends who are studying for courses that I wasn’t even on but it still counted. It’s a slightly traditional way to go about things and I’ve actually had to sit my father down and tell him that I had no intention of studying right after dinner and was instead just going to fuck around (not in those terms of course) until about midnight after which I was going to pull an all-nighter because it was easier to study when it was quiet, but it’s still the general assumption of the way that things are done.
On a less ‘this is the way we do things’ note one of the other aspects that the films really brought out was the sheer oddness of L. In the manga he comes of as almost harmlessly quirky but in the film there was no way around how disturbingly odd he was. Film Watari had far less screen time due to the compact format but was also wonderfully played, Misa was understandably cute in the way that you’d expect an idol to be without being over the top and Light’s father was still the possibly one of the best renderings of the modern day older hero that I’ve seen in a long time. The shinigami were all rendered wonderfully and looked suitably disturbing, though Ryuk was the most jarring of the lot since the constant close ups revealed that he didn’t blink due to having no eyelids.
Overall, I was highly impressed with both films and have every intention of watching the third. I do need to finish reading the manga at some point but I’m quite prepared to accept that the films are a different rendering of the same story so I won’t be complaining about the differences. The anime on the other hand, both in original Japanese and in American dub format will nevertheless continue to be a source of endless hilarity for me.
The film version differed from the manga since the story was truncated and presumably it differs from the anime too, though I can only confirm that he endings of all three play out slightly differently. What struck me most about the films were the way that certain things that I’d completely bypassed in the manga suddenly made sense.
This is a very petty revelation but it’s only in the live action that things like Light’s haircut and colour as well as his constant studying made sense. His hair had always baffled me but I’d put it down to the sort of dynamics that tend to occur in manga: in the live action it suddenly struck home that it’s just a longer version of that same haircut that every Oriental guy has to have at least once as some kind of right of passage. Usually we all have it at shorter lengths and I did myself have it at a shorter length than any of my friends but it is essentially the same style: Light just wears it much, much longer than is the norm. Likewise, his hair colour isn’t actually anything drastic and is in fact just a more conservative version of ‘Hong Kong orange’ since it’s darker than the norm. And once again I’ve had hair bleached to that shade myself, as well has having had it ash blond at one point because I was in my early twenties and it’s something of a right of passage.
Similarly Light’s constant studying isn’t anything beyond the norm in so far as when you’re in the run up to exams you really are expected to, if not study, at least go to your room for extended periods of time and make studying motions. Gone are my father’s day when he’d actually have to study at the table with his brothers, under the watchful gaze of grandfather or the monks who ran the boarding school: these days you just go to your room, close the door and get on with it. You don’t even really have to study for solid blocks of time as long as you keep to your room. You can go online, read, even potentially just take a nap: as long as you’re in your room and there’s a revision timetable up somewhere accompanied by the relevant study materials those five hours are fair game. You can even have friends around because regardless of what you’re actually doing, in Oriental parental terms it’s a study group. I’ve sat in the rooms of friends who are studying for courses that I wasn’t even on but it still counted. It’s a slightly traditional way to go about things and I’ve actually had to sit my father down and tell him that I had no intention of studying right after dinner and was instead just going to fuck around (not in those terms of course) until about midnight after which I was going to pull an all-nighter because it was easier to study when it was quiet, but it’s still the general assumption of the way that things are done.
On a less ‘this is the way we do things’ note one of the other aspects that the films really brought out was the sheer oddness of L. In the manga he comes of as almost harmlessly quirky but in the film there was no way around how disturbingly odd he was. Film Watari had far less screen time due to the compact format but was also wonderfully played, Misa was understandably cute in the way that you’d expect an idol to be without being over the top and Light’s father was still the possibly one of the best renderings of the modern day older hero that I’ve seen in a long time. The shinigami were all rendered wonderfully and looked suitably disturbing, though Ryuk was the most jarring of the lot since the constant close ups revealed that he didn’t blink due to having no eyelids.
Overall, I was highly impressed with both films and have every intention of watching the third. I do need to finish reading the manga at some point but I’m quite prepared to accept that the films are a different rendering of the same story so I won’t be complaining about the differences. The anime on the other hand, both in original Japanese and in American dub format will nevertheless continue to be a source of endless hilarity for me.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-12 02:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 10:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-12 02:49 pm (UTC)You're not the only one; while watching the anime last year, I spent half the time in fits of malicious laughter and never really figured out what was happening. To compensate for that, the music was enjoyable.
I think you would enjoy L: Change the World; there's a certain death scene which has to be the most unintentionally hilarious thing put on film.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 10:15 pm (UTC)L: Change the World has now made it onto my list of films that I am unashamedly delighted by. I can’t say a bad thing about it which puts it up there with things like Hitman and Lord of War. Very strange death scene aside (what where they doing to him in the lab? Electrocuting him?)… well, I can’t even criticise that all that much: the sheer brilliance that is L excuses any directorial slip-ups.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-13 02:50 pm (UTC)And to tell the truth, the manga is unintentionally hilarious more than it should be and the anime was so damn faithful that the same thing happened. It was still a fun watch.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 10:39 pm (UTC)I can’t really get behind the anime because the way certain things are rendered just strikes me as bizarre and often rather silly. The anime of course involves more movement over all since you have to have the connection between events that were just framed starkly by the manga in separate panels but for me it just doesn’t work. In the manga Light came off as a megalomaniac first and foremost but in the anime he seemed to be rather more socially dysfunctional as far as I was concerned.