Live-Action Remakes Of Animated Movies Are Usually Terrible – But There's One Way To Save Them

Live-action remakes of animated projects are a dreadful prospect, as there is very little to be gained from them. Something is always lost in translation, and live-action can never fully replicate the magic of the animated original. These are the death of creativity, even if they make obscene amounts of money.

Granted, there are exceptions to the rule, and a few projects exist that managed to capture what made the original special and provide something new. Such was the case with Jon Favreau's "Jungle Book," as the movie was mostly a showcase for StageCraft technology that was later used prominently in "The Mandalorian," and David Lowery's "Pete's Dragon." They virtually reinvented the animated original to become something new and unique. This last one is important because not only does that movie remain the single best remake of a Disney animated movie, but it is part of the template for how to save the very concept of the live-action remake of an animated movie. 

You see, Lowery is not a for-hire filmmaker; he's not a director who leverages his indie rep to join the blockbuster game and stay there. Instead, he's a director who can go from an indie darling to a big-budget Disney movie, then back to a very low-budget ghost movie, and a Robert Redford caper. Even his most epic movie is the rather intimate fantasy adventure, "The Green Knight." This is to say, having Lowery tackle a live-action adaptation of "Pete's Dragon" was bound to have a creative vision beyond just copying the original.

So with the announcement that Hirokazu Kore-eda will helm a new live-action movie adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto's manga "Look Back," which has already been turned into a brilliant anime movie, there is plenty of reason to be excited.

Kore-eda is the best Japanese director working today (in live-action), which makes this announcement quite exciting. He actually has experience directing adaptations of manga before, having helmed Air Doll" and "Our Little Sister." This is what makes the announcement so intriguing: that Kore-eda would pick "Look Back" as his next project, and the idea that he most definitely did it because he has a take on Fujimoto's incredible one-shot that only he could realize.

What makes Fujimoto's "Look Back" so great is how it fully utilizes its medium, with the manga (about two young girls who become manga creators) meditating on artistic collaboration while showing what it is about still images divided into panels that captivate audiences and creators. The animated adaptation, which was one of the best movies of 2024, adapts this idea to a new medium by making each drawing the protagonists draw burst from the page and explode in visual wonder. Even if Kore-eda cannot (and should not) replicate these visual flourishes in live-action, he has definitely proven to be adept at telling intimate, small-scale stories and capturing the people often neglected or ignored by society.

His decision to make a film about the joys and the struggles of a pair of artists is an enticing proposition, especially if the movie expands on the rather short length of the manga and the short runtime of the anime by deepening the characters and the world they live in. Without going into spoilers, there is plenty of tragedy in "Look Back" that Kore-eda should be more than qualified to turn into a heart-wrenching live-action story. It is this idea of having directors with unique visions tackle the impossible task of translating animation (or comics) into live-action that could save these projects.