When it comes to adapting another medium into a film there are good and bad examples all around. Sometimes it takes a while before people are able to figure out how to get things just right. For instance, it took a while for filmmakers to learn how to make great adaptations of comic books. And depending on who you ask, it was really only recently that someone figured out how to make a truly great adaptation of a video game with The Last of Us. But there’s still one area where people haven’t quite been able to crack the code. That’s live action adaptions of anime, specifically ones made in America.
Say what you will about Netflix’s recent attempts at adapting anime. While I personally do think they’ve done an okay job, as a whole I think Hollywood does not have a good track record with anime adaptations. When the topic of live-action anime comes up, there’s one film in particular that gets brought up as cautionary tale: Dragonball Evolution.
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Dragonball Evolution came out in 2009. For those who don’t know, it was a adaptation of the insanely popular Dragon Ball franchise. Many people, including those from my generation, grew up with the series (particularly Dragon Ball Z) thanks to television blocks like Toonami. There it was featured alongside several other iconic anime.
Now, Dragon Ball is often cited as one of the shows to really help boost anime’s popularity in the west. Given it’s success it shouldn’t have been a surprise when 20th Century Fox bought the rights for a film adaptation in 2002. What was a surprise, however, was just how terrible and truly insulting the final product was.
The movie went had a very hectic production, and it started during the process of selecting a director. Surprisingly, big name directors like Robert Rodriguez and Zack Snyder were offered the project. Obviously, both turned it down. The longer it took to make the film, the less it seems Fox cared about making a genuine blockbuster. Instead, the studio decided to creating a cheap piece of garbage just to cash in on the title. I mean how else do you explain the budget shrinking from $100 million to $30 million. Considering how bad the movie looks, I’m willing to bit that most of that money went to marketing.
While I could go on forever talking about all of this film’s issues in intricate detail, I’m just going to shotgun the main issues.
Casting
All of the characters in the anime are clearly Asian, yet a majority of the actors in the film are WHITE!
Series creator Akira Toriyama is famously quoted as saying that if a live-action adaptation were to ever be made, he imagined the character of Goku being played by a young Jackie Chan. Instead, the character is played by American actor Justin Chatwin. On top of not being Asian, Chatwin was also a relative newcomer at the time. He only had a handful of film credits, including a role in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. Without a bankable star in the lead role, the film honestly never had a chance, but he was just one of many actors playing whitewashed cahracters.
Plot
The movie has almost nothing do with its source material!
In the manga/anime Goku, starts off as a young boy living on his own, who has no knowledge of the rest of the world. This includes having no understand of things like marriage or cars. Here, however, he’s just a nerdy teenager that goes to high school, who hates fighting. This, despite the fact that canonically Goku loves fighting. That brings me to my next point.
The Fighting
The fighting that we do get in the movie looks awful. In fact, all the action is ridiculous. By now, you’ve probably seen a very funny meme from the film which features Goku trying to back out of a fight by do a backflip over a car. If not, watch the clip below!
As you can see, none of the action makes sense at all. On top of it all, the final battle is one of the most boring and ugly looking climaxes to an action movie you might ever see.
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I think the thing that really enrages fans like myself is the fact that this really is the worst kind of adaptation. It’s enough to make you cynical about all live-action adaptations.
Let it sink in. A major studio bought the rights to a property solely because it was popular. They didn’t know or care about what it was or what made it fun or special. They hired people who have since admitted to knowing nothing about the property, and doing the job purely for a paycheck. Then that same studio cut down its budget to the point that it looks like a bad made-for-tv movie from the 90s. Then they dumped it in theaters hoping they would be able to profit off the name alone. Thankfully it didn’t. Instead it crashed and burned – hard.
People often bring up The Last Airbender as another example of terrible anime adaptations. While The Last Airbender isn’t really an anime to begin with (sorry to be that guy),I’d still call DBE (I can’t write out the whole name anymore because it hurts too much) the worst because at least The Last Airbender has decent effects and action. Dragon Ball Evolution feels like someone just took the script to a generic Kung Fu movie and then randomly put some of the names from the show in afterwards.
Sadly, given the failure of DBE there’s never been another attempt at adapting Dragon Ball into live action, and it might still be a long time before we get a proper adaptation. I have no idea if Disney currently holds the rights, but if they do I hope that somebody is able to come along and convince them to give this property a real shot. While I never needed a live-action adaptation in the first place, I really don’t want this to be the only one it gets. It deserves better than this.
