Fantasy Adaptations should be Animated

Do y’all remember a few years back when Hulu announced they were going to make A Court of Thornes and Roses television show? That should be animated, right?

Let me explain.

Fundamentally, I believe all fantasy story adaptations should be animated.

Why?

Well, it’s not due to a hatred of live actions, even if I am a little exhausted by them. In fact, up until three years ago, I couldn’t stand animations or any animated series, and actively avoided them due to disinterest. After COVID and the huge evolution of television, it turns out I was actually incredibly interested, I was just watching the wrong animations. I was watching shows like Sword Art Online and Yuri on Ice. While these animes are good in their own right and definitely have a fanbase of their own, they are not stories that capture the grandness I feel animation can strive for. A grandness inherently built into fantasy novels and worlds.

A few years back during COVID this concept of fantasy as animation started tossing around inside my brain when I heard that Percy Jackson was getting a new adaptation. To be honest, I was never excited for this series or its announcement. I knew the grand, fantastical scale seen in the Percy Jackson novels could never be done feasibly well on a reasonable, tv show budget. I also didn’t believe that Disney would want to risk profits so predictably high on a dependable, but still fairly new, franchise. In other words, I knew stuff would be cut from the story. A lot of stuff. 

My entire point comes down to three things.

1.      Realism

Realism is overrated. There, I said it. Now, don’t get me wrong, some media is very well suited for a realistic setting. The Last of Us and The Walking Dead, shows whose entire basis revolves around highlighting how crazy the world is vs how lost humanity has become. This type of thematic story needs realism for emphasis of its ethos. If Joel was a 10-foot-tall lanky guy walking around like Wilt from Fosters Imaginary Friends, it would not have the same moral impact. However, not all media relies on the comparison of humanity vs society and not all media needs fantastical realism.

So, if realism is out the window and animations are in, characters can be expressive without the realities of an actor’s capabilities too.

Let’s say the Percy Jackson show didn’t get as incredible of actors as Leah Jefferies and Walker Scobell. Percy and Annabeth go through a lot in the Percy Jackson series, which might be too heavy, and too hard, for an actor of their age to portray correctly or in the depth required. You could keep your adaption to perfection by using hand drawn emotions and skills instead.

In animation, eyebrows can go extremely up or extremely down based on how your feeling, bodies can twist and turn without the realistic danger of popping a hip out of place, and the laws of physics are often forgoed a lot more willingly than in real life. Disbelief is entirely suspended and is in fact, deep in the underworld.

For example, if Percy Jackson was sad, maybe a storm could flicker overhead only for a millisecond, or lighting could reflect in his eyes like a spark of anger. While you COULD do these in a television show, the CGI and time it would take is not something most filmmakers are invested in. 

While I want to make a comparison here to campy live action movies and television shows,  it has rarely been done right. The only correct example is the Scooby Doo live action movies from the 2000s, which nailed body humor and affects most live action comedies don’t dare to even try. But again, that’s an entirely different medium based on a preexisting animated visual. While the Percy Jackson books do have humor, they are not based in it nor the over-the-top silliness of unrealism that would make live action satisfying.

But for the Percy Jackson television series, whose entire internal reality relies on things being out of this world insane and unbelievable to Percy, who is a fish-out-of-water, setting it in a realistic, live action summer camp that’s bogged down by humorless, and lightless scenes, not only destroys the campy humor of the book, but the effect that our Greek mythos has on the story over all. Greek myth was kind of insane. That was the point, and it was entertaining to read and watch. Did they forget the goal of an adaptation is to entertain us?

A lot of fantastical scenes or settings in Percy Jackson, like the underworld aesthetic or the bus fight between the furies in the beginning of Lighting Thief, were cut down due to budget issues and realistic filming capabilities. An animated show could’ve made it massively wonderous without limit. Percy Jackson can do many crazy stunts, like falling off a bridge and surviving (how close is that bridge again)? Stunts like this when put on a photorealistic lens lose their charm and look ridiculous, whereas in animation, would look engaging. Animated fight scenes could also individualize each character. Annabeth could be more fluid in her fighting skills and strategic, while Percy is more rigid and expressive. I feel there are a lot of options here for further character and personality development than is fundamentally impossible for a live action show, that also must work around the time restraints of child actor laws, the realistic abilities of a budgeted tv show, and safety concerns around all actors. Somethings, especially fight choreography, a stapple of the fantasy and epic genre, are just not able to be done realistically.

While I do hate it, the world of Percy Jackson and other fantasies do demand realism to an extent and that’s what adds the humanity to the Percy Jackson series or the sex appeal to A Court of Thorns and Roses. Speaking of ACOTAR…

2.      Creative Decisions & Liberties.

Now I can hear the screaming and typing from here from angry fans. ‘The ACOTAR aesthetic wouldn’t work for an animated show,’ And to that I say, you are simply thinking too narrowly.

While A Court of Thorns and Roses does seem to be a very obvious live action property, with all its sex, dark fantasy, and lots of gore, it is also a good choice for a darker type of animation. I think to make an animation like A Court of Thorns and Roses really work, would be something closer to Castlevania or Arcane. An animation with an edge, with grime and shadows and an underbelly. Just because you imagine something as simple, doesn’t mean it has to be such. 

I also think an animated series would help for practical reasons. The ACOTAR fandom will never find a single human being that encapsulates everything Rhysand and Feyre are supposed to be and look like. Even if you find someone who is perfectly chiseled in all the right places with magical purple eyes and ambiguous ethnicities, another half of the fandom will have a problem with him. No one will ever be perfect enough to play the Archeron sisters, at least not in the fan’s eyes, and live action dimensions would not satisfy what fans want from the Batboys. They were written for fantasy, and it’s unfair to have to now shrink them down for casting’s sake. Plus, I would not want to torture some poor actor or actress through the abuse these fans can throw when they think they’ve been robbed a book accurate portrayal. Think back to how fans reacted so poorly to Danielle Rose Russel being fancasted as Feyre by a twitter page. She experienced so much hate and fat shaming, she deactivated all of her socials and left acting for a short period.

But I also know they will never adapt this series as an animation. Why?

A few reasons come to mind. One, not to stereotype anyone, but the demographic of people who read A Court of Thorns and Roses vs the demographic who watch stylistically weird and edgy animations are in separate rooms, let alone in the same pie circle. Two, A Court of Thorns and Roses relies on realistic and nonrealistic sexiness. While A Court of Thorns and Roses does have high fantasy, it’s mostly in its action scenes with the use of Rhysand and Tamlin’s powers or how they visually look. When action is not being taken place in a battlefield or under a mountain, the world is pretty tame and manageable, which might make for an uninteresting landscape and animation 50% of the time. But with the right animator, who knows?

Side Bar:

Animation doesn’t have to be just for kids. While I did start my examples with Percy Jackson, a notoriously famous children’s book, that is not all fantasy and animation could do together. It’s kind of insane that in a world where we got Attack on Titan, Perfect Blue, and Under the Red Hood, that people still believe animations are just for children’s media. Perfectly good adult fantasy books would be great adaptations.

Ursla Lea guins’ Earth Sea and Tolkien’s The Hobbit come to mind when I think of an adult styled fantasy that might really work. Hell, I’m actually really excited for the art style chosen for that Twilight reboot that HBO is producing.

While Lord of the Rings was a great adaptation, no other adaption can ever be as lucky to have so much faith, dedication, and financial input put into an adaption. The Hobbit could’ve been a particularly spunky and adorable animated mini-series that both children and adults could benefit from instead of the CGI mess we got from the 2010’s adaptations.

The Dark Tower series by Stephen King is another great example of a potential animated series. This one is kind of cheating since it was a graphic novel with that horrible boring movie attached but imagine the creative styles and eye candy shots we could get from this type of creative storylines and characters.

I think The Witcher could be a great example too, with so many fantastical monsters and creatures and fight scenes that could keep the attention and high energy pace of fight scenes by making them unrealistically cool. Think of an Attack on Titan type fight, style and movements. While you know it’s not realistic, it doesn’t take away from the story nor the effect it’s having overall.

While I was fine with the Six of Crows adaption, aside from it getting canceled, (count your days, Netflix) I think an animated styled show would’ve held up to the grand world scale better, and could’ve done some really cool affects with the heartrenders abilities within the world, like showing the inside of a beating, tortured heart, or the way Nina stuck inside Matthaeus head while he was in the prison.

Animation would entirely change the medium being presented and isn’t always required. Think of Game of Thrones. It was a great show, and they pulled off some amazing stunts, costuming, and settings. They also had a budget of $15 million for the final season. I don’t think Hulu or Paramount can break out those types of numbers for any typical show or adaptation. And now we come to the last reason behind why fantasy should be animated.

3.      Budget

Animations could save y’all a lot of money.

If studios were investing less money on book accurate costuming, book accurate set pieces, book accurate casting, they could feel secure in their saved money to take bigger risks on indie projects, scripts, or lesser-known books to adapt since there was less at stake.

If Disney is worrying about how much a 20-gallon tank of water is going to cost for one scene where Percy controls it, they could spend that much on a dedicated team of artists who can showcase their creativity behind the pen, and god knows they got ‘em. Plus, it would be rewardly, because multiple artists and teams could be working on different projects at once and put out some big projects around the same time, keeping the company making profit and keeping up the momentum of creating. On average, studios spend around $20-25 million dollars per production, bouncing their crew, actors, and equipment around for location changes that grows costly and timely. But what if the locations changed in the room with us?

Another fantasy/science fiction story that deserves this animated treatment is World War Z, my absolute favorite book of all time. That book jumps around a lot, from global to local settings, and to characters and what’s required of them, that would turn into an overly expensive and unprofitable adaptation. Thus, movies and television will never try to adapt it accurately, or if all, ever again. But animation would make a lot more realistic and financial sense. You wouldn’t have to worry about budgeting a crew of a thousand out to the woods of Russia to film one zombie chase scene. You could draw it all right there, and could add in shots, times of day, and scenes overall, that are impossible with time constraints. I also think, in terms of zombies at least, an animated horror style could work really well to blur the disturbing uncanny with the canny that is nearly impossible to do with the best makeup artists. 

Animation can also be so much more stylized and varied based on the artist’s preference, which could help separate genres and similar stories into their own unique mediums. Animation also lasts the test of time and holds up to rewatches more. In an era of streaming, rewatching, and reminiscing, that’s what studios want, for people to keep returning to beloved works and feed into the nostalgia machine of media. Hell, people are still talking about the Clone Wars animated series that started in 2008, whereas the Star Wars prequels are only looked at in interest of nostalgia, with poorly aged CGI, and yet, was only made three years before.

So, to wrap it up, while not every story could benefit from this, I think fantasy novel adaptions is the best place to start and should be considered!

If you want to watch a video version of this essay, check out my Youtube channel for a digitzed version here