It's always exciting to see a favorite story get adapted. You get to see your favorite scenes animated! The story will get greater exposure, giving you more people to talk about it with! And for some of us, we get that hipster cred when we discover something before it becomes mainstream! The downside is that it's remarkably difficult to make an adaptation work, and some mediums have it worse than others.
Visual novel adaptations, unfortunately, usually don't turn out very well. When they do turn out well, they're usually still inferior versions of the source material. It's why the great news about the new Rewrite anime is often met with anger and frustration instead of excitement and optimism.
That's a justified response given the anime industry's track record. Some of them will even describe why the anime is doomed from the start. What exactly are the solutions, then?
"The Rewrite anime can be good, but they have to do it right."
Despite being a tautology, this is completely useless advice. Literally anything on the planet can be good "if done right." Animation, interior design, murder, you name it. There are a set of qualities that can make each of these productions "good." Our job, then, is to isolate what major obstacles face anime producers when making adaptations and describe possible remedies for them.
In short, the fundamental obstacle with most adaptations is this:
---Writers choose the medium to fit the story.
Note that this isn't always true in storytelling. Authors write their stories in books because they lack the resources to make movies. These are limitations which don't necessarily reflect qualities of the stories themselves. Perhaps the starving author would make a movie if they could. That's not what we're concerned with.
---Visual novel writers chose the medium for the story.
For a visual novel writer, there are particular qualities that are attractive in the visual novel that are absent in other mediums. Sometimes these writers will select other mediums for their stories: a notable example is Jun Maeda, who began with VNs (Kanon, CLANNAD, Little Busters!) but eventually started writing for anime (Angel Beats!, Charlotte).
For him, choosing the medium was an explicit choice.
"I want to explore the function of family in a number of different ways, so I'll write CLANNAD as a visual novel so I can have multiple routes."
"I want a fast-paced mystery that spans one timeline, so an anime would be better for Charlotte."
In short, the medium itself played a role in the telling of the story. Adaptations often will ignore this and try to coerce the VN into a linear, animated form. If we really want a good adaptation, the subtleties of the new medium itself needs to be considered. Changes need to be made. A carbon copy usually just won't do.
You have to analyze the strengths of each medium in order to make a good result. You need a new direction.
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Below I list some common pitfalls that anime adaptations suffer and offer suggestions each of them. I tried to list as many as I could think of, but I don't expect this to be complete. At the very least it's a good starting point for analyzing the differences in media.
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Problem 1: Content
This is usually the first thing that people point to when describing faulty adaptations, but I wouldn't classify this as the biggest contributor to bad anime. However, it is still a big concern.
Visual novels are long and dense. Many of the "great" VNs are in excess of 50 hours long. How can you condense 50 hours of content into 13 hours of anime? Inevitably, content will be lost. You can't avoid that. It's impossible to represent everything in the adaptation. You have to cut things out.
Do we really need Kappei's route in a CLANNAD adaptation? No, this doesn't tie in as well to the main story as some of the other routes.
Do we really need talks about food in a Fate/stay night adaptation? No, there are other ways to characterize the protagonists while having them do things that matter.
Do we really need Okabe's dense description of the laboratory in Steins;Gate? No, we get that already through visuals and cinematography.
The problem of reducing content is difficult. Trimming content is hard without deciding on a new direction for the story in the adaptation. Sometimes projects are doomed from the start (Umineko) if you can't find a way to condense information in subtle ways.
The strength of motion picture is that things can be shown. There are plenty of ways to represent information outside of text. You don't need to turn description into dialogue. You can turn description into imagery.
Problem 2: Multiple Routes
This is the next most-cited point in these kinds of discussions. At first glance, it's impossible to reconcile this difference. Anime is linear, The visual novel isn't. However, directors have shown us clever workarounds over the years. The CLANNAD approach can work if you can "de-romanticize" the routes: simply splice the temporally compatible routes into character arcs for the minor characters. The CLANNAD anime's treatment of the game is altogether special: since the narrative focus in the anime is almost entirely devoted to Tomoya and Nagisa, you get to experience Tomoya and Nagisa solving the other characters' problems, instead of just Tomoya. It creates a new dynamic between the story's characters.
A lot of the time this simply isn't possible, though. It the routes are not temporally compatible, the directors will need to reevaluate the structure of the anime. Why cram a bunch of incompatible routes together? This stems from the misconception that an anime adaptation of a VN needs to be a strict retelling of the VN's events. It doesn't have to be that way as long as you frame the audience's expectations appropriately. Aren't there other ways to characterize the minor characters without ripping the routes from the VN?
Problem 3: Perspective
In my opinion, this is one of the largest obstacles in adaptation. Visual novels are (usually) told through first-person limited narration. Anime is not. The importance of perspective is often overlooked because it usually doesn't contribute to bad adaptations, but rather mediocre ones. Most of these VNs would be "just okay" without the focus on narration. Certain VNs are fantastic because of their reliance on this narration (Muv-Luv Alternative works so well because we are constantly assailed by Takeru's most intimate thoughts). Failing to capture that aspect of the story doesn't always cripple the adaptation, but reduces its emotional impact on the audience. It's a silent killer.
There are a number of choices anime studios have made over the years to address this:
- Provide the narration as voiceover
- Provide the narration as dialogue ("People die when they are killed")
- Ignore the narration altogether
- Show the character's thoughts visually (through cinematography and mise-en-scene)
Each approach has its merits and uses, but the choice should be made consciously and with awareness of the work as a whole.
This is a subtle point that is often overlooked. Anime are episodic, visual novels are complete. To turn a complete work into a serial one, you have to slice up the plot.
Compare this with manga, another serial medium. Manga is delimited by chapters. At least in this way, manga is easy to turn into anime since you don't need to make decisions about where to interrupt the action. That's given to you by the author already.
For the visual novel, you need to forcibly impose boundaries for plot segments. This is a storyboarding and directing problem. Thus, the directors' and scriptwriters' vision is imposed onto the anime itself. This isn't a bad thing. On the contrary, this forces them to develop their own vision for the anime and adopt stances that may differ from the source material.
Problem 5: "Quirks"
The visual novel, as a medium, has a rich history behind it. There are plenty of "quirks" and conventions now attached to it that aren't present in other media. It's natural that some artifacts would play around with our expectations of the medium. Ever17 and Little Busters take full advantage of the conventions of the VN form in order to subvert them later on. This effect is lost when translated to a medium without those quirks. At least in these two examples, you can probably achieve a comparable effect with nonlinear storytelling, but then the resulting statement is one broader and less focused than the one in the original work (i.e. commenting on the expectation of linear narrative is less specific than commenting on the expectation that subsequent playthroughs of a VN exist in their own closed-off narrative spaces, for example).
Summary: What is the purpose of this adaptation?
This is the most fundamental question we must ask ourselves when adapting an IP. What do you wish to accomplish with this anime? Do you want to faithfully retell the story or introduce a unique spin on the concept? Specifically, are you marketing this towards fans of the IP or are you trying to appeal to a wide audience? You can do both, but you need to frame the anime for your specific goal. You'd be surprised at how frequently the anime industry spawns ill-conceived adaptations. In reality the issue is complicated because directors and screenwriters must work with bigwig executives to balance artist merit with mass appeal, but this doesn't have to be damning.
I don't care if the studio has to remove things to make it marketable.
I don't care if you change the style to make it work.
I don't even care if you deviate from what made the VN good in the first place.
Just make the anime good on its own terms.
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