Ask John: Is a Faithful Blade of the Immortal Anime Possible?

Question:
Is it really impossible to do a good anime adaptation of Blade of the Immortal? What does Blade have that works as a manga that just can’t make it as a manga in motion with sound? Isn’t the problem not that Blade can’t be adapted but that it was adapted poorly? It’s hard to believe that no amount of talent and budget can make a good Blade adaptation.

Answer:
Hiroaki Samura’s multi-award winning manga series Blade of the Immortal (Mugen no Jyunin) premiered in 1994 yet wasn’t adapted into an anime until 2008. It’s said that Samura long opposed the possibility of an anime adaptation of his manga because he feared that anime would be incapable of recreating the visual and stylistic atmosphere of the original comic. To some extent, he may have been right because the Blade of the Immortal anime, produced by Bee Train Production, did not visually capture the look of the original manga. However, that’s not to say that doing so would have been impossible.

Samura’s Blade of the Immortal manga is characterized by artwork that resembles very detailed and precise pencil sketching rather than the typically clean, refined inked drawing of typical manga. Bee Train’s anime adaptated the etched style of the manga into conventional anime design. Bee Train, established in 1997, has animated a variety of genres ranging from children’s anime to dark and violent action stories. But Blade of the Immortal is the studio’s only samurai themed work. And with the exception of its first production, the family friendly Popolocrois Monogatari TV series that used a bright and happy color scheme and cute simplified art design, Bee Train’s output has never strayed far from a visual style representative of typical contemporary anime. So perhaps rather than Blade of the Immortal being impossible to adapt into animation, maybe Bee Train was simply uninterested in or incapable of creating an anime adaptation faithful to the visual design of the original work.

From at least the mid 1970s onward, anime productions including Manga Nihon Mukashi Banashi and Yonimo Osoroshii Grimm Douwa have occasionally used a visual style similar to that of the Blade of the Immortal manga. Contemporary viewers may recall seeing an animated pencil sketch style used during the endings of the Evangelion TV series and Nasu: Andalusia no Natsu movie. The visual design of the 2003 Kyogoku Natsuhiko Kosetsu Hyaku Monogatari (Requiem from the Darkness) TV series may not be precisely like Blade of the Immortal, but as a samurai horror themed anime with a “sketchy” aesthetic, it does suggest evidence that a faithful anime representation of Blade of the Immortal is certainly possible.

It may be an oversimplification to call anime “manga with motion,” but fundimentally both creations begin with hand drawn artwork. Manga relies on limited key shots to suggest motion. Anime fills in the moments between those key shots to create motion. If an artist is able to draw in a particular way in a manga, I imagine that it should be possible to add additional similar drawings to create animation. That says nothing about the talent or funds needed to carry out that project.

I’m not an enthuastic fan of everything that studio Bee Train has created, but I do like a number of the studio’s works – some of them very much. I don’t know why Bee Train was selected or granted the opportunity to create the anime adaptation of Blade of the Immortal. There are seemingly other studios better suited to the task. Taken independently, the Blade of the Immortal anime isn’t bad. It merely fails to impress, especially in relation to expectations. Reportedly a anime adaptation of Lone Wolf & Cub is now in development. Goseki Kojima’s art resembles classical Japanese sumi-e painting rather than Samura’s pencil sketch style, but Lone Wolf & Cub still represents a samurai manga originally depicted with a visual style not typical of contemporary anime. If we see a future Lone Wolf & Cub anime that aesthecially resembles the original manga, we may be able to extrapolate the principle that manga with unusual draftsmanship aren’t impossible to faithfully animate.