Ask John: Why is Anime Different From its Source Manga?

Question:
I’ve noticed that when a company makes a manga comic into a show, they change the storyline a bit. Why do they do that?

Answer:
Actually the degree of similarity or difference between an original manga and its anime adaptation depends partially upon the status of the original manga, as well as the intentions of the animation creators. Often times anime adaptations are extremely faithful to their manga source. The Dragonball and Crying Freeman anime, for example, are both virtually identical to their manga source, right down to the use of identical camera angles in the manga and anime versions. In other cases, such as Berserk and Ghost in the Shell, the animated version is significantly different than the TV series adaptation. Still, in other cases, such as Akira and X, the animation has to be somewhat different from its manga origin either because there’s too many characters or too much story in the manga to fit into the animation, or because the manga is incomplete and the animators have to come up with an original ending exclusively for the animated version. In some cases, such as Rurouni Kenshin and especially Berserk, slight or dramatic changes are made because the original manga source is too violent to be exactly replicated in television animation.

It’s probably a safe bet to theorize that anime adaptations are sometimes different from their manga source because the animators wanted to show something to the audience that the audience wasn’t already familiar with. In other cases, such as Black Magic and Ghost in the Shell, we can assume that only excerpts of concepts from the original manga were used in the animation because the exact story couldn’t be directly animated, but certain ideas in the original manga were worthy of further exploration in animated form. In other cases, such as extremely popular manga like Dragonball and Hunter X Hunter, which have a very cinematic visual style, the animated versions remain extremely faithful to the manga because the shows are intended to appeal directly to the massive number of readers and consumers that buy and read the manga. In this case, the idea is not to show something different and introduce new fans to the manga source but to appeal directly to the original manga fans themselves.