To adapt, or not to adapt, that is the question; especially since there has been so much controversy over recent attempts. Whether it’s book to film or animation to live-action, choosing to remake beloved works in another medium comes with a great weight. As film and TV series continue to franchise, building out their narrative worlds, the shift from animation to live-action and vice-versa has become ever-more popular. That being said, execution is everything.
Several animation to live-action remakes have come under scrutiny, often charged with losing the essence of their source material: Avatar: The Last Airbender (2010) was sacked for its poor writing and acting, Scarlett Johansson’s casting as Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell (2017) was criticised for white-washing and the quick and rampant churn-out of Disney live-action remakes feels trite: old stories milked for easy cash. Whilst several of the Disney remakes have been commercially successful and received critical acclaim, amending outdated narrative structures for modern audiences, they are otherwise carbon copies, void of any substantial innovation.
The most recent and scandalous contender in this category came earlier this year when PJ Acetturo spent $100 to make a ‘live-action’ remake of the Princess Mononoke (1997) trailer using AI. The backlash was, as can be expected, heated. Many highlighted that the trailer is simply a shot-for-shot remake, adding nothing and coming off hollow, devoid of emotion or creative flair. Even when using photo-realist data, the live-action characters are masked by a creepy kind of CGI, one that dumps them straight into the uncanny valley.
In a now deleted post, Acetturo claimed for over 20 years he wanted to see a live-action version of the Hayao Miyazaki, and that the trailer was merely an ‘experiment’ in how far AI had come. But more importantly than whether AI can do the job, the trailer really begs the question of why we need a live-action rendition of Princess Mononoke at all. Not only is the obsession with live action grounded in a reductive concept that photo-realism is what makes art visceral and good, it once again can’t seem to act beyond replication. Live-action remakes are a boring solution to a manufactured problem.
The reverse, however, doesn’t seem to be as controversial. Animated additions to movie franchises aren’t just cheap copies, but often expand on the lore and timelines of the original. Films such as The Animatrix (2003), Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and several of the animated Star Wars movies are fun and innovative ways of expanding on the worlds and emotional complexities of their original franchises. There’s a certain leniency with animation. Where live-action remakes carry so much expectation over what beloved characters and scenes may look like, we are a lot more forgiving of how events and worlds are remade in animation.
There is something about animation that lends itself to a pure suspension of disbelief where the laws of reality are completely unbound. Restricting fantastical worlds to the concept of live-action, even when manipulated by AI or CGI, feels purposefully obtuse. That isn’t to say there is no hope for this particular kind of adaptation or that all live-action remakes always falter. Instead, it’s a plea that producers take animation more seriously as a potential mode of adaptive story-telling.
It speaks to what the godfather of film theory, Sergei Eisenstein, called animation’s fundamental feature: plasmaticness. A neologism of his own making, plasmaticness is a combination of plasma and plastic and attends to our fascination with metamorphosis. Linked to the cellular process of meiosis and the malleability of our own bodies, we seek out and feel pleasure in response to the plastic arts. Animation can twist and spread out in otherwise impossible ways. Lines and forms are vitalised with mobility. As a result, Eisenstein claims, animation ensnares us in a state of wonder not dissimilar to early man’s attraction to fire.
It’s exactly because of this spectacular quality that animation, at its core, is both full of potential and full of life. Whilst live-action is more ‘real’, animation can access emotions with far more poignancy. It’s why adding an animated number to an otherwise live-action franchise feels less derivative—it’s recognisable as an addition, expanding the narrative world rather than attempting a one-to-one replica. As Eisenstein explains, animation is expansive. It’s all about transfiguration. This mutability transcends beyond a movie’s form and seems to seep into the very act of story-telling itself.

Take, for example, the latest film to come out of the Lord of the Rings franchise, The War of the Rohirrim (2024). sIt’s not merely Peter Jackson’s triumphant trilogy redone in a different style, but recounts a tale briefly told in the Two Towers regarding the history of the people of Rohan. Directed by Kenji Kamiyama, The War of the Rohirrim offers a new aesthetic choice with a different kind of nostalgia, one that doesn’t rely solely on the reputation of Jackson’s masterpiece.
Similarly, Into the Spider-verse was shockingly refreshing for what could have been just another superhero movie. Into the Spider-verse, The film reimagines its hero’s story, a stark contrast to the dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s a film that could only have made sense in animation, the expanding, intertwining timelines functioning as a kind of plasmatic narrative.
Equally successful is The Animatrix. A series of nine animated shorts based on The Matrix franchise brought together several Japanese writers/directors from the anime studios Madhouse and Studio 4C. All widely different in style, the shorts offer backstories and new, global perspectives on the lore of The Matrix. The shorts range from happy to sad, mysterious to thrilling, and provide a fresh take on a narrative that could easily become overplayed.
As The Animatrix and Rohirrim show, animation allows for cultural cross-pollination. Handing over a western franchise to Japanese animators can only lead to reshaping how we tell stories, pushing the peripheries of what these stories can mean and do.
There is always a level of comfort and safety associated with remakes—stories that we know like the back of our hand. Despite this, viewers still crave new narrative and aesthetic choices within them. Animation offers all the comfort of childhood nostalgia whilst throwing us into worlds of mind-bending form and style. There’s a hope here that producers will stop seeing animation as an inferior medium: A rung below the authority of live-action and instead view it as a profitable and powerful medium in its own right.
Words by Kit Gullis
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