Cruel Angel Theses

In my idealist world of adaptations, movies like the abomination that was the Death Note live action would never exist. It was good as a movie for movie’s sake, but not good enough for my higher standards. Neither was it a case of source material fan bias — for what it’s worth, the only thing an adaptation should do is contain the essence of the original, the brilliance that made people sit up and gape in wonder, and this is where the Death Note movie didn’t work for me.

If it isn’t obvious already, neither did the Honey and Clover movie. Sitting down to watch it with a small group of close friends, I viewed it again through the eyes of a newcomer to Chika Umino’s colourful little world. Yes, it’s very pretty, but what does it do? A convoluted, dizzying effort that tried to cram in the heartbreak of 36 episodes or 10 volumes, which just didn’t seem right to me. Maybe it’s the cynical bias, but I’ll leave that to you to decide.

Let’s take a moment to delve into what stunted the Death Note live action movie, ultimately preventing it from achieving more than it could. Forget for a moment that L’s penchant for sweet things translated into an loony diabetic on the big screen, or how Light having a girlfriend was like that horrid, anime-only, melodramatic scene in Claymore 21 with Raki hugging Priscilla in the cave — it detracted from the original, and did nothing to improve or expand on it.

The lack of elaborate internal monologues were a let-down for me. Part of the reason why made the DN manga a success, in my opinion, was the voyeuristic way in which the reader was let into a character’s head. Far from being the thriller that the movie seem bent on insisting it was, the manga lent another angle to Light as a character, allowing us to follow and understand his reasoning every step of the way. Removing a bulk of that was like ripping the guts out of DN, turning Light and L from creative and twisted geniuses to B-grade smarty pants in the blink of an eye.

With that in mind, I found the H&C movie to be a pale imitation of the source for the very same reasons. It was a futile attempt at cramming in as many characters as possible, resulting in most, if not all of the cast coming off as one-dimensional and cartoon-like. Hey, this Mayama dude likes this older chick a lot, and we’re going to have a tough time adapting this — wait! I know! Let’s turn him into a stalker, because it’s essentially the same thing, right? Oh, and this Morita fellow, let’s change him from eccentric-talented to haughty-talented. The fans won’t notice the difference!

of all the things they could have left out, they decided to cut the “I want a brooch with a duck on it!” part, which means I was going “NOOOOO” and /wristing when Morita took Hagu’s book and… decided to play tug of war with her

Which goes without saying that I didn’t like a lot of what they did to the characters. Takemoto and Shuuji were the only two characters they managed to not screw-up bigtime: a lot of Yamada’s heartfelt dialogue was eaten up due to time constraints, Hagu ended up looking like some special needs child from the way she childishly smiled at everything (in the anime, it’s a lot more obvious why she’s smiling, and a lot less creepy), and Rika, assertive you say? No. Just… no.

H&C’s strength lay in the multi-faceted characters who had more to them than, say, prodigious talent, or an unrequited love, or a stalker complex. Like DN, paring down the characters to what the screenwriters thought would be enough just wasn’t, I’m afraid. Personally, I would have whittled down the cast and/or given more focus to what I thought were the bare essentials of H&C — well-rounded characters, and a refreshing take on the love triangle. Trying to cram in too many things at once just wasn’t that wise, if you ask me.

Of course, now that I’m laying it out I can see the dilemma those in charge of the adaptation must’ve had. How do you adapt a series where each and every character has an interlocking relationship with each other, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant? It’s a tough decision to make, but I would have chosen to rewrite a larger part of the script, culling a character or two in the process, if it meant the end result would be fleshing out their personalities just that little bit more.

So the movie’s guilty of spreading itself too thin. Even so, there was the dramatic premise of H&C, “innocent love leads to complicated relationships”, that could have remained the focus. I didn’t like how, in trying to squeeze in everything — a nod to the difficult Rika-Shuuji relationship in a picture of the two with Harada, the Lohmeyer story being alluded into a song about meat, or the random Nyanzaburo insertion — it felt more like a summary of the series than anything. I had no reason to really care for any of the characters. Or how as a first-timer, the deluge of information was ridiculous. We’re hardly done introducing the resident weirdo, the stalker, and the straight man when we’re now supposed to remember lovelorn girl and headphone girl’s names, and actually care for all of them in their respective relationships?

I’d like to note at this point that focusing on the resolutions rather than the characters themselves was a short-sighted move. H&C is a show where practically NOTHING HAPPENS, and instead of looking at overall character development, an emphasis on the character’s actions resulted in something that seemed more like a parody than anything. H&C was about love at its most unpolished, from the quiet understanding that comes with unspoken attraction to the innocence lost post-confession, and it was what every character lived with — their actions were influenced for the most part by this burden of emotion that they bore.

Yoko Kanno’s music was the saving grace. I’d have never thought the day would come where I saw something helmed by the maestro herself that wasn’t stellar, but it’s with heavy regret that I say this. Throughout the groan inducing scenes that could have come out of a musical (on hindsight, maybe a H&C: The Musical would have made for a better movie) like Morita being all arrogant and brash instead of his playful, conflict-avoiding self or the campy double stalker scene, the soundtrack proved to be a failsafe through and through.

It’s also the only soundtrack I’ve felt to be a wasted effort, like casting pearls before swine. There are not one, not two, but six insert songs throughout the whole movie, not counting Spitz’s unusually palatable ending theme. While insert songs are all about maximising emotion and driving home the impact of a particular scene more forcefully, with this movie I felt nothing. It was a tour de force, with almost every Kanno trademark you could think of being thrown in and James Wendt/Oikawa Rin’s voices being more than up to the task, but at the end of the day a soundtrack’s only as good as the movie, and when you take into account what this movie was for me, I’m afraid it was a whole lot of ear candy.

As the credits rolled and the lights came on in the room, I turned to the only friend of mine in the room that hadn’t heard of or seen H&C in some capacity before this. One of them had seen the entire first season, the other only in parts, and his was the opinion I really wanted to hear, as it was the only opinion, as it were, that wouldn’t be tainted by bias of some sort.

He was understandably confused, perhaps less than I’d have hoped for. Then I popped the question: Would he be willing to see a superior version of it, a version where Mayama was less scary, Morita more approachable, Hagu less retarded? All in the short short span of 36 episodes, I added, and suggested he watch like one a day for a whole month or something.

He shook his head and grinned. Thanks, but no thanks, he said. I don’t blame him, though, given how he’d just sat through close to two hours worth of what would be akin to a whole lot of nothing. He wasn’t moved, wasn’t intrigued by the love triangles or relationships, and wasn’t curious to find out more about what had basically been fed to him in a convenient nutshell.

He did mention that Aoi Yuu was cute, in any case, and that’s what I found the movie to be: Something very pretty that did nothing to convert the non-fan over. Was it discouraging to a loyal fan? Definitely. Am I sufficiently disillusioned with anime to movie adaptations, now that I’ve encountered two lacklustre productions back to back? Not while the Takemoto in me still screams “Youth is best!”, I won’t.