What books would you like to see transformed into either an animated movie or maybe an animated television series? I could see Robert Asprin’s Myth series as an Adult Swim project, and Sapir and Murphy’s Destroyer as an anime-style series. I think a lot of Heinlein’s works would work best as animated movies, but Dicksons Dorsai/Childe Cycle might take both an animated series and a movie or three.
What say you?
I still want a Dante’s Inferno film. There’s a horrible version with a totally bullshit add-on with Dante as a warrior battling demons to rescue Beatrice who’s been captured by Lucifer because Dante cheated on her. It’s totally bogus and I want someone to give it another go.
Definitely. For that matter, I’d like to see Niven and Pournelle’s Inferno turned into an animated movie, and their Dream Park books turned into a four season animated series, one for each book.
Jack Vance’s Eyes of the Overworld, done by Studio Ghibli. I’d prefer a tv mini series with a couple of chapters per episode but I think compressing it into a film length version could work if the script was right.
The Pern books would make great anime.
For a long time I have thought that anime would be the best way to visualize Dune would be as an epic multi part anime.
I would love to see Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time saga.
The Tale of Despereaux, a profoundly excellent children’s book (I read it most years to my class and never fail to choke up at the end), was turned into a steaming turd of a movie. I would love to see Studio Ghibli give it the treatment it deserves.
I believe that would require an entire Robert Jordan Cartoon Network.
in view of this being a hypothetical and not constrained by costs - why animation? with CGI being what it is now, the only reasons i can think of are stylistic ones, especially with regards to people. the typical anime look, for example, doesn"t really work in 3D. what other reasons would there be? would the Lord of the Rings in animation be better than the one we have now?
Because this is the “Turning books into animation” thread?
okay, i was just wondering if there was a deeper reason for the choice. carry on.
They actually DID try an animated version of Heinlein’s Red Planet almost 20 years ago for Fox Kids. Like most other Heinlein adaptations, they changed it severely:
Others? I thinmk a lot of mythology would look great in animation. The circa 1980 effort Metamorphosis, AKA Winds of Change had a great concept – an updated Fantasia, with the Greek myths as subject matter and modern rock music by top-of-the-line groups. They even lined up a bunch of classic Disney animators for it. But it fell through. The rock acts dropped out, the animation was sub-par, and they defaulted on their hope to do it in pantomime by getting Peter Ustinov as narrator.
But I’d like to see the Epic of Gilgamesh, or some of the lesser-known stories from The 1001 Nights (there’s tons of stuff, beyond genies and magic lamps). I could see some weird, artistic version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with voiceover reading of the poem by some big-league actor, like Ian McKellan.
Now that good CGI is around, I’d like to see science fiction done as live action, with good CGI effects. I’ve filmed Fredric Brown’s Arena in my head numerous times. (If you’ve only seen the Star Trek TOS version, you owe it to yourself to read the original story, which is infinitely better – and has a an altogether different ending)
Really? I haven’t read it since HS, but isn’t it just Dante and Virgil wandering around Hell and seeing a bunch of classical and 14th century political figures Dante didn’t like getting their innards chewed on by demons? I don’t remember it having much in the way of plot, and without a lot of awkward exposition (on the plus side, if I watched it I’d finally learn to pronounce “Guelph”), I doubt even a fairly educated audience would know who most of the people depicted were, or why they were having their innards chewed on by demons.
Maybe it could work as a sort of trippy art-project, but as a story I think it’d leave a lot to be desired.
It didn’t have a whole lotta plot, but the visuals could be stunning. Have a look at the Gustave Dore illustrations for the Inferno:
http://www.worldofdante.org/gallery_dore.html
If you want plot, maybe you could animate Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle’s novel Inferno, which places a modern-day SF author in Dante’s Hell, and has him try to escape.
I wouldn’t mind seeing Robert E. Howard’s stories done in animation. Lord knows, nobody’s ebven tried to do a faithful adaptation of Conan for the screen – they cut out all the stuff that makes it interesting. For the immense monsters and exotic sorcerors, the Mighty-Thewed Cimmerian Giant, and the gtravity-defying voluptuous leading ladies, animation might be the best way to go. It’s be like the Frazetta/Bakshi effort Fire and Ice from thirty years ago. Onloy better, because you’;d have a real Robert E. Howard plot.
For that matter, animation might be the best way to do H.P. Lovecraft’s stories. Imagine The Dunwich Horror done with complex, computer-aided imagery. Or The Shadow over Innsmouth, culminating in hordes of stampeding Innsmouth denizens, and a view of the undersea city.
Well, no descriptions of dresses and such are necessary so that should cut down the number of episodes needed by about 75%.
Lovecraft’s short story From Beyond has been animated in claymation here.
While the protagonist of The Shadow out of Time is live-action, the Great Race and their civilization are done with stop-motion in this film.
The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has made excellent adaptations of The Cal of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness, both as period pieces with stop-motion effects.
But I was thinking more along the lines of computer-aided color animation adaptations of everything in the story. It could truly rock.
See the CGI animations of Lovecraftian elements in Hellboy, for instance, to get an idea.