That favourite characters meme recently...

[hmpf]

I forgot a few really important ones. Can I have a number eleven on that list?

11. Kenji Endo; Otcho; Yoshitsune (Naoki Urasawa: 20th Century Boys)

(Yes, three characters instead of one. I can't possibly choose between them. I don't know why I forgot about them in the first place... probably because I forgot to catch up on the manga for so long. *ashamed*)

Comments

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

I assume you already know about this - and I have no idea how faithful it is to the original, but in on the offchance you didn't hear about it, they made a live-action movie trilogy adaptation of 20th Century Boys in Japan (though I'm sure a version with German or English subs would be available) released over the course of 2008/2009.

Yeah, I know.

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

The third part is not out yet, I think.

I'm not sure I want to see it. 20th CB is 24 volumes of densely packed plot with something like 20 or more main characters, spanning something like four or five decades (from the 1970s to the future); there's no way they could squeeze even half of it into three movies. And I care too much about the manga to see it butchered.

My god, it's scary...

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

... how closely the movies get the *look* of the manga right. Nearly every frame in these trailers feels like it comes directly from the manga, and, even more amazingly, the actors look nearly exactly like their manga counterparts, too. (I remember noticing this when I watched the very first teaser trailer, in 2008 or so, but I'd forgotten how uncanny it was.)

http://www.4digitalmedia.com/20cb/trailers-20thcen.html

Huh.

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Actually, looking at this movie poster, it looks like they did their damnedest to put in as many of the characters as possible:

But will that make a good movie, or a mess, I wonder? (http://images.google.de/imgres?imgurl=http://asiacue.com/images/movies//16/660-20th-century-boys:-chapter-two---the-last-hope_cbdc2603.jpeg&imgrefurl=http://asiacue.com/movies/20th-Century-Boys:-Chapter-Two-~-The-Last-Hope_20~Seiki-Shonen:-Dai-2-Sho-~-Saigo-No-Kibo_2009.html&usg=__saaEykU5jW61IY9CTthTunbI0B8=&h=499&w=350&sz=38&hl=de&start=14&um=1&tbnid=56Qk5Nu-BncfiM:&tbnh=130&tbnw=91&prev=/images%3Fq%3D20th%2Bcentury%2Bboys%2Bmovie%2Byoshitsune%26hl%3Dde%26client%3Dopera%26rls%3Dde%26sa%3DG%26um%3D1)

I am also struck...

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

by how much the level of special effects of this looks about like (modern-day) Doctor Who's. *g*

(Especially in the third part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIqdxj0iSQo&feature=related)

Heh.

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Here's the mangaka himself singing his main character's song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cth3QHUDF_I&feature=related

One of the stranger... tie-ins I've encountered, I think.

Random geek fact about me:

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

I have the manga page of this scene up on my wall above my desk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UMmhdf9-Z8&feature=related

Re: Random geek fact about me:

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Hee! I love how many replies this created... ;)

Wikipedia claims that the final film was released in August 2009 in both Japan and the USA, but...maybe it didn't happen? At least in the UK foreign films or films that don't do excellently in the US are always being shelved, pushed back for release or sent straight to DVD...

I do understand that worry about how well it'll translate into a movie. I'm not even a particularly huge Harry Potter fan and while I love the "look" of the movies I often find myself disappointed by the stuff they left out (okay, that's a problem in some movies more than others).

I do know that apparently it was some epic undertaking of filmmaking in Japan, though again, to compare to HP, that doesn't necessarily mean it will be what you want it to be.

Re: Random geek fact about me:

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Hehe, yes, I've rediscovered my 20th CB love big time, it seems. Spent nearly all night rereading the books. Well, or rather, I spent the night *beginning* to reread the series - I only managed a couple of volumes, of course. This will probably take a couple of weeks or so.

I have so much love for this manga. I think it's actually one of the few really long-running series (in any medium) that has a satisfying ending. Not perfect, but not a monstrous let-down, you know? (Anything that long is bound to have *some* unsatisfying answers and some untied strands at the end, I think.)

Mainly I love it for the characters, though. Even if aspects of the story fall flat, the characters - their arcs, their development, but also their basic personalities - are things of beauty. And it's all the quiet-but-awesome character moments, the ones that for me really *make* the manga, that I doubt will have been translated to film.

I spent a lot of time leafing through the volumes yesterday night, finding again a lot of my favourite moments. I'm probably going to post some of those, one of these days. (Easy enough, nowadays that you can just link to onemanga.com. *g*)