in the shell

I need help. I have to do a speech coming up, and my topic was going to be not seeing manga/anime as the same thing as Superman, etc.

Does anyone out there know of any movies that we inspired by an anime or manga?

So you mean movies inspired by anime or manga. That is hard. Most of the movies I can think of where inspired by American comics.

hmm...

Do you mean English-language live-action films based upon manga/anime? The only examples that come to mind are the movies based on the Guyver franchise, but I don't think those will change anyone's mind about anime or manga... and the Fist of the North Star movie with Gary Daniels and Chris Penn...

I can't believe I just owned up to having seen those flicks.

Yeah I need English movies inspired by anime or manga.

Ex: The wachowski brothers who wrote the Matrix said they were heavily influenced by GITS. I was just wondering if anybody knew any others that had similar origins.

Slash that any movie inspired by a manga or graphic novel like The Grudge or even V for Vendetta.

Since you mentioned The Matrix, I'll mention Luc Besson's The Fifth Element. The Jean-Paul Gaultier costumes had a comic-influenced sensibility (a French sensibility, of course), and the film featured design work by comic artists Mézières and Moebius. The movie isn't an adaptation of a particular comic, but some of the characters and scenes in the film were directly influenced by Valérian: Spatio-Temporal Agent, a famous French comic series that Jean-Claude Mézières illustrates. (I think there are some comic-to-film comparions online, in which panels from the comic are put side-by-side with shots from the film.) And the plot's very reminiscent of the stuff you'd find serialized in older issues of Metal Hurlant, and in older French science fiction titles.

I enjoyed The Fifth Element. It appealed to the kid in me...

Thanks. Speaking of The Matrix does anyone know the site that lists the similarities between GITS and the Matrix.

Here's a pretty thorough comparison of the two films:

http://www.mkygod.com/matrixgits/

ah you just beat me to it with the link I think that guy goes a bit overboard though. Some of the linked scenes he suggests are a little bit thin e.g. both films have a helicopter, in both films someone wakes up; similar links could be drawn between ghost in the shell and aliens vs. predator

Alot of the similarities come from the fact that the matrix was shot in a way that was a major stepping stone in virtual cinematography which allowed them the freedom of camera movements normally just availible in animations like GitS; as people are making films closer to animation they're bound to take some stylist cues from animation. um... IMO anyway...

at least the matrix has better neck jacks, i know a girl who's always claiming that being penetrated with a neck jack is an analogy(hehe NLP ) for bumsecks... should never have shown her 'ExiStenZ'....

I think the "waking up" thing had to do with when the waking-up occurs structurally, not with the fact that both films have characters who wake up. Some of the other comparisons have to do with how the shots are framed...

at least the matrix has better neck jacks, i know a girl who's always claiming that being penetrated with a neck jack is an analogy(hehe NLP ) for bumsecks... should never have shown her 'ExiStenZ'....

Was this on a date, or is the woman in question just a friend with whom you watch movies?

I hope Cronenberg films aren't Elmo's idea of "date flicks"... I'm trying to imagine dates involving screenings of The Brood, Shivers, Videodrome, and Crash...

Speaking of films based on comic books, and speaking of Cronenberg: A History of Violence. Changes a lot of stuff from the comic, but still an interesting piece of cinema-- and better than, say, the Hughes Brothers' Alan Moore/Eddie Campbell adaptation, From Hell.

Neither Wagner and Locke's A History of Violence nor Moore and Campbell's From Hell count as "stereotypical" comics... and the respective film adaptations aren't what most folks think of when they imagine "comic book movies."

Oh, and the Collins/Rayner graphic novel Road to Perdition was turned into a pretty neat film. And the graphic novel was pretty clearly influenced by the Lone Wolf and Cub manga and films; Max Alan Collins spoke in a Comic Book Resources interview about the manga and its influence on his comic:

"Lone Wolf and Cub is a masterpiece. Prior to Road To Perdition, I wrote a lengthy article about the manga and the movies it spawned that was published in Asian Cult Cinema and elsewhere. Part of Road is my attempt to do an American homage to that great manga -- it seemed to me that a godfather was like a shogun, and a mob enforcer was like a samurai. I acknowledge the debt with an epigram at the start of the book from Kazuo Koike: 'You must choose a road for yourself.' So you have a father and son fleeing betrayers, and seeking vengeance. That said, this is only one element of Road, one ingredient... At any rate, I would cherish any reader or reviewer who found Road to be a worthy American cousin to Lone Wolf; and would be thrilled if Road led more readers to this wonderful work."

http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/ ... gi?id=1240

AlphonseVanWorden wrote:Since you mentioned The Matrix, I'll mention Luc Besson's The Fifth Element. The Jean-Paul Gaultier costumes had a comic-influenced sensibility (a French sensibility, of course), and the film featured design work by comic artists Mézières and Moebius. The movie isn't an adaptation of a particular comic, but some of the characters and scenes in the film were directly influenced by Valérian: Spatio-Temporal Agent, a famous French comic series that Jean-Claude Mézières illustrates. (I think there are some comic-to-film comparions online, in which panels from the comic are put side-by-side with shots from the film.)

I didn't know that, and I read several issues of that comic when I was a kid. I never read much Lone Wolf and Cub, but I recognised them in Shogun Assassin.

I didn't know that, and I read several issues of that comic when I was a kid. I never read much Lone Wolf and Cub, but I recognised them in Shogun Assassin.

The Valérian-Fifth Element connection is an excellent example of feedback between comics and films. Besson's a huge Valérian fan, so he hired Mézières to do some design work on The Fifth Element. The movie was a dream project of Besson's, one he'd been wanting to do since he was young, and when he had the chance to work with two of France's leading comic book artists, he hired them to do the film's concept and design work.

As Jean Giraud (better known as Moebius) said in an interview: “When Luc Besson did The Fifth Element, he went back to a story he’d written as a child under the influence of comic strips. He wanted to pay tribute to the work of Jean-Claude Mézières and Moebius, and so he decided to use us both as production designers. It was a bit of an homage, and at the same time, a very touching gift from a reader. In a way, you could say it was a very Moebiusian moment.”

The Incal, the classic science fiction collaboration between Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius, was one influence on the film. But the New York scenes...

Mézières did some preliminary design work for Besson in the early 1990s, but the project's funding fell through, so Mézières incorporated some of the material he'd designed for the film into Valérian's fifteenth album. (After all, the film might never get off the ground, and cool ideas are cool ideas...)

When Besson got funding for The Fifth Element, the writer/director changed some parts of the script based on what he'd liked about Les Cercles du Pouvoir-- the aforementioned fifteenth album-- altering the screenplay to emphasize design aspects originally done for the film, but which were now a part of the comics' narrative universe. And certain things from the fifteenth volume of the comic wound up influencing the direction the film took. Besson really liked the stuff in the album about a supporting character, S'Traks the taxi driver. Pierre Christin and Mézières, Valérian's creative team, had fallen in love with the idea of futuristic taxicabs. Besson originally had thought that The Fifth Element's characters should travel around New York by riding a kind of elevated train. When Besson saw what Mézières had done in the comic with the taxi designs, which the director had contemplated using as part of the movie's background visuals, he got to thinking... So taxis became central to the plot, and the director got Mézières to do a few further designs for the movie...

Valérian's impact on The Fifth Element was so extensive that some of the movie's shots actually reproduce or visually quote panels from Les Cercles du Pouvoir; this is particularly true in the film's New York scenes.

(A translated version of The Circle of Power, the fifteenth volume in the ongoing Valérian saga, is available Stateside in The New Future Trilogy.)

The Valérian comic's been going for almost forty years-- it started as a serialized comic in the 1960s-- and Valérian and Laureline are still having adventures...

EDIT: If anyone's interested, some text (in French; the interview covers some of the same ground as the above post) about the relationship between the comic and the film, some panels from Valérian, and several production sketches for The Fifth Element can be found at the official homepage of Jean-Claude Mézières:

http://www.noosfere.org/mezieres/pages/ ... ement5.htm
(Notice that panels from the Valérian album are used to illustrate the artist's comments about the taxi; click on "Galerie" for more Fifth Element design work.)

The Valérian comic:
http://www.noosfere.org/mezieres/Images ... ouvoir.jpg
http://www.noosfere.org/mezieres/pages/ ... ouvoir.htm

Ah, that explains it. I wasn't a kid in the 1990s, so by then I had quit reading those comics. Mostly because I had already read all the albums that could be found in the local library, and once I quit going to the library for reading materials, I quit checking for new comics as well. And as it turns out now when I look, they don't have the Circles of Power.

We owe a lot to the French when it comes to quality comics. Most of the best stuff I read when I was a kid seems to have been done by people with French names. And I don't think that it was only because the libraries had that stuff for free, while Disney and other comics from USA cost money. Although that probably had something to do with it.

We owe a lot to the French when it comes to quality comics. Most of the best stuff I read when I was a kid seems to have been done by people with French names.

Gillsing, I agree with you. I became interested in French and European comics back in the Eighties, and I have a great deal of affection for the stuff. I still read certain titles. I adore the work of certain French artists and writers, and I try to keep up with them-- and to keep up with newer talent. There's some neat stuff coming out of France (and Belgium, and the rest of continental Europe)...

By the way, about the connection between comic books and films... Marc Caro, the guy who collaborated with Jean-Pierre Jeunet on Delicatessan and City of Lost Children, used to work on comics for Metal Hurlant and other French titles. The two men met at an animation festival in the 1970s and became friends and collaborators, working together on animated and live-action short films. So if Delicatessan and City of Lost Children reminded you of comic books at times...

In 1984, Jeunet-- who later filmed Amélie and A Very Long Engagement as solo projects-- directed "Pas de Repos pour Billy Brakko", an award-winning short film based on one of Caro's comics.

Did anyone throw in History of Violence yet? Also The Crow series
and Ghost World.

Rocketter would go for the influence thing.

(Im back sorta)