Scott Pilgrim Takes Off: A Great Adaptation

Beginning in 2004, Bryan Lee O’Malley began a 6-volume anime and video game-based graphic novel saga titled Scott Pilgrim. The character’s name came from a single by the rock band Plumtree, and O’Malley took the idea of a guy who “fights you for a thousand years” and turned it into a manga-styled comic set in Toronto, Canada. The book series gradually gained great success over the years and as it continued word of mouth helped it became a cult phenomenon. Then in 2010, a live-action movie based on the comic was released by Edgar Wright, the mastermind behind the Three Flavors Cornetto trilogy, featuring an all-star cast with Michael Cera as the title character. The film wasn’t the blockbuster most people wished it was, but if did become a sleeper hit over the next few years, which included a hit video game incorporating elements from the movie and comic as the two storylines are moderately different from each other since the movie came out a month after the comic had concluded. Zoom to 2023, and Netflix airs a genuine anime series of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off that most thought was going to be a straight up adaptation of the comic, but in fact it diverges from the original path and goes in a totally separate direction which seriously split fans down the middle. The production was largely crafted by Dandadan’s studio Science Saru and featured dazzling animation that honors the original comic style plus acts as a reflection of early-2000s pop culture.

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off was a limited series of just 8 episodes which slightly works against it as it would have benefited from having an extra episode or so. The original story has Canadian youth Scott dating the new girl in town, Ramona Flowers from America, and he must defeat Ramona’s seven former lovers called The League Of Evil Exes, although this is happening while Scott is also quasi-dating a teenager named Knives. Scott fights against one or two in each volume of the comic and eventually wins the right to be her lover. The anime starts out retelling the original story and then takes a sharp turn from the source material and has Scott losing the fight to Matthew, Ramona’s first boyfriend, but Ramona doesn’t believe Scott is dead, so she tracks down all her exes to see who was behind Scott’s disappearance. This highlights the background of the League and how Ramona was partially at fault for them eventually becoming a supervillain team, plus it gives the other supporting characters time to expand their horizons and find out what kind of world they would live in if this key role in their lives were removed. It all comes together in the last 2 episodes where we learn that Scott was really taken into the future by his older self and we are given a lot of exposition behind Scott’s disappearance, so Scott himself is largely left out of his own anime if you’re not counting Even Older Scott who levels up to Dragonball Z status and can defeat the Evil Exes at once, and still keep up with his younger self. The series could’ve used at least one more episode to give the main character a little more time to shine and to make the anime somewhat appealing to anyone who hadn’t come across the comic or movie first.

Science Saru combined their fast-paced hand-drawn animation with CGI for this anime. For better examples of this watch either the movies Riding Your Wave, Inu-Oh, or The Colors Within, all of which utilize various styles of animation that will remind you how groundbreaking anime like FLCL earned its mark, even better than the other FLCL remakes. A few other TV series that Science Saru also applied this special technique to are Devilman Crybaby, Adventure Time, Star Wars: Visions, and the recent Ghost In The Shell remake. Their idiom works like peanut butter and jelly when bringing Bryan Lee O’Malley’s art style to life. This was another attraction to the production as the original character designs from the comics were united with Science Saru’s sensibilities resulting in a winner combo. There is no doubt that Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is a legitimate anime as it was specifically produced first for Japanese language as the dub doesn’t totally fit the mouth movements of the English cast. The anime also managed to get all the original actors from the movie to reprise their roles for the English dub, and these are not smalltime names like Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Chris Evans, Brie Larson, and Aubrey Plaza, so it shows how devoted the cast was to this project.

The anime also had a new story by O’Malley along with screenwriter BenDavid Grabinski. For a long time, O'Malley didn’t just want to do a soulless remake of the comic, so instead he borrowed an idea from Marvel with their What If stories by taking the basics of both the comic and movie and diverted it into a literal alternative timeline. Scott’s older self brings his younger self into the future, so he won’t eventually get married to Ramona and separating years later which sends him into a spiral of depression. O’Malley did update a few things to the script, most of which involve completely rewriting the backstories of some of the Evil Exes, specifically Gideon Graves who was really an old schoolmate of Scott’s antagonist Julie. Plus, the turn of taking the lowest member of the Evil Exes and having him defeat Gideon in the second episode and getting his entire corporate empire. The Exes also get their roles expanded and are not just level bosses, and along with way we learn that Ramona wasn’t totally free of being kind of evil herself when it came to handling her exes. When Ramona can detach herself from the rut her life had become and confront her past lovers she learns more about herself. This redoes Ramona from being the manic pixie dream girl the movie painted her out to be as she takes responsibility for her actions and finds a new purpose as a stunt girl.

Like the movie, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off hosts an awesome soundtrack, most of which was performed by Anamanaguchi, an 8-bit rock band that provided the music for the video game based on the movie, plus its recent sequel game, Scott Pilgrim Ex which acts as a follow-up to the anime. The soundtrack also houses great covers of geek songs like Konya Wa Hurricane from Bubblegum Crisis, and the Mortal Kombat theme with new lyrics to fit the anime cast. The best are the new songs by Scott’s band Sex Bob-Omb with his former girlfriend Knives turning out to be a musical genius and joins the band as a keyboardist. This helped the show become the first anime to be nominated and win the Critic’s Choice Award for Best Animated Series.

Speaking as a fan of Scott Pilgrim whose been reading this since the first volume was released in paperback, the anime was the best possible detour that proves that a premise can be stretched across several formats. If you include the video games, this is a multimedia saga that still has room for more. Hopefully it won’t get too excessively pointless reboots like “Lil’ Scott Pilgrim” or “Scott Pilgrim In Space”. This anime though lives up to all expectations for any other fans of the comic or movie, plus a brilliant throwback to garage band music and underground comics that spawned in the late 90s. Oh, and if you’re a retro-gamer, you’ll find far more treasures here than in Ready Player One or any of the Tron sequels. So, if you can put your inner bickering fanboy on hold for a few hours and just sit down and enjoy a great Netflix binge, then you’ll find it was all really worth it.

ANI-MOVIES, *Transformers: The Movie (40th Anniversary Celebration)

"Beyond your wildest imagination," was what this bad boy boasted in 1986, and it didn't disappoint. Coming out two months after Hasbro's first franchise theatrical release for My Little Pony, they went even bigger with Transformers: The Movie, however this was an extension of an animation show whereas MLP only had a pair of TV specials prior to its motion picture, so Transformers had a big leg up continuing an existing series. The film came out after Season 2 of the original Transformers series but shot the story two decades into the future skipping over a whole bunch of history which have never been covered in the Transformers lore, plus quite a few of the characters that were introduced duirng the latter part of Season 2 were completely left out of the movie since the movie started production sometime at the beginning of that season. The film was written by Ron Friedman who also created the GI Joe series, and it had a gaggle of diverse celebrities voicing the new characters including Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy, Eric Idle, Robert Stack, and Orson Welles in his last movie roll appearance, plus the first theatrical appearance of John Moschitta who up until then was the fast-talking guy from Fed-Ex commercials and later became the Micro Machine Man. The other huge selling point was the rocking soundtrack by Vince DiCola featuring songs by Weird Al Yankovic and King Kobra. Since Transformers was a melting pot of different Japanese toy lines put together in a single narrative, the idea for the movie was to introduce an entirely new roster of characters to the same lineup that G1 fans had already become familiar with, so this caused most of the characters to either get brutally murdered or reformed as a totally new one. The effect of this apparently traumatized many younger viewers seeing their favorite Autobot leader die which was retconned in Season 3 taking place after the movie. The movie had a huge effect on the toy industry when the film just swept away the first line of products to show bright shiny new ones, a strategy that caused many toy franchises to eventually collapse such as He-Man and TMNT. However, the film had such lush animation by Toei and Sunbow along with brilliant performances by celebrity and veteran voice actors that the movie became a sleeper hit.

Shooting from 1986 to the year 2005, we find that the Decepticons eventually regained control of Cybertron leaving the Autobots with the task of defeating them with their limited sources, one of which is a full Autobot city on Earth. Megatron leads an assault on Autobot City with fresh-faced soldiers like Hot Rod, Kupp, Arcee, and Blurr to defend it until Optimus Prime arrives with the calvary. Prime and Megatron have an epic duel to the death resulting in Optimus' demise, while Megatron is cast out by the retreating Decpticons along with other damaged warriors. They all just happen to come across the gigantic planet-eating monster known as Unicron reformatting Megatron into his herald Galvatron, plus remodeling the other survivors. Starscream is finally killed by the newly born Megatron, who has to take the Autobot Matrix away from its new owner, Ultra Magnus which is the only thing that could destroy Unicron. The new Autobots along with most of the Dinobots leave Earth to keep the Matrix out of Galvatron's grasp, but are all separated, some of which crash on a huge junkyard planet inhabited by the TV-obsessed Junkions. They all reconvene and head out to kick Unicron's colossal butt from destroying Cybertron, and Hot Rod uses the Matrix to destroy him and become the new Autobot leader, Rodimus Prime.

Transformers: The Movie completely changed the game as far as animated entertainment intended to promote a franchise as after this other toy line-based films like GI Joe: The Movie had to contend with not having any of their characters meet a violent ending. Toei Animation along with Sunbow Productions and Marvel crafter together an eye-popping theatrical experience that was way better than it ever intended to be. Even people who hadn't watched the Transformers G1 series up until then still got a kick out of it, especially since it had one the greatest soundtrack albums of the entire decade. If you're local theater is having a special screening of this, then get your tickets and ride the nostalgia Astrotrain!

MISC. MANGA, *The Great Yokai War: Guardians

During the late 1960s, director Yoshiyuki Kuroda created a movie trilogy titled Yokai Monsters, and in 2005 Takashi Miike of Audition fame put together an homage to the original films called The Great Yokai Wars. Shoot ahead to 2021 and Miike did The Great Yokai War: Guardians which acted as a reboot of the franchise and only tangentially a sequel to the 2005 movie. There was also a 3-volume manga series adapted by Sanami Suzuki who also did the manga retelling of The Colors Within, although the manga went has an appearance by the giant Daimajin from his own movie franchise.

In modern day Japan, a colossal culmination of evil called the Yokaiju is planning on laying waste to Tokyo. The local spirits known as yokai want to prevent this disaster, so they take their case to the World Yokai Conference to get the help of monsters from other countries, but they decide that Japanese yokai are seen nowadays as cute mascots instead of monsters, so they leave Japan's yokai to deal with this threat on their own. The only hope they have is in young Ken Watanabe who is the descendent of infamous yokai slayer. Ken turns the yokai down, so they talk his younger brother Dai into becoming their savior, but Ken knows this will lead to Dai's demise, so he heads off to the spirit world to find him. With the help of Koko the kitsune, Ken embarks on a crusade to save his brother and possibly help the yoaki with their impending threat.

The Great Yokai War: Guardians is a feasibly likable manga that a reader can check out without having to see the motion picture to like it. Sanami Suzuki is a great artist, although it's hard to say if his writing is up to specs, or if the English translation by Titan Manga wasn't Americanized a step too much. There's plenty of laughs and sight gags to find enjoyable, although nothing as dark as some of Takashi Miike's prior movies. For a lighter view of natural spirits trying to defend their homeland, then this is one spooky army you'll want to sign up for.

ANI-MOVIES, *Predator: Killer Of Killers

After 5 live-action movies and 2 crossover films, we finally get a full-length feature of the Yuatja. Predator: Killer Of Killers follows the path that The Animatrix and Batman: Gotham Knight did before it and took an established media franchise and made an anthology movie about it with most of the stories tying together into a single narrative at the end. We've seen this before in other productions like Halo Legends, however this one is actually canon to the Predator series, either that or its in a parallel universe. This was directed by Dan Trachtenberg who had already done Prey, and then followed that up with Predator: Badlands, plus he wrote the screenplay for this with Micho Robert Rutare. 20th Century Animation created a gorgeous production, although the constant low frame rate is getting a little tired with every animated movie trying to keep up with the Spider-Verse movies.

The first chapter is The Shield where the viking warrior woman Ursa takes her son on a quest to avenge her father's killer, only to be interrupted by a Predator, and she is taken prisoner by the other Yuatja after killing the alien hunter. Next is The Sword about the samurai Kenji who has a duel with his brother to settle a decades-long feud over their father's armor, but they end up working together to stop another Predator with Kenji's brother dying to save his life, although Kenji himself is also collected by the Predators and put on ice along with several other humans for centuries. The third story is The Bullet which is a WWII tale where a young American pilot named Torres manages to shoot down a Predator airship only for himself to later get abducted sometime after the war. All three heroes are awakened on a different planet where they all have to fight to the death to have the honor of taking down a Predator champion. However, the trio of Earthlings ally themselves to escape on a spaceship, but only at the sacrifice of Ursa becoming a captive again. The film ends with some other Yuatja taking some frozen leftovers from past Predator movies hinting that there will be a big future team-up for survivors in another installment.

As a Predator movie, this was pretty good, but as an animated action flick it's a little below average with its graffiti-styled graphics. The action is turned up to 12 compared to the other Predator films, but that's mostly when the humans are fighting other humans, with the viking chapter being especially gory, although that might have been the reason this didn't get a theatrical release and went straight to streaming. Pred-Heads will more than likely get their blood pumping on this, but it doesn't have the lasting power of the previous good Predator movies.

BNA: Brand New Animal, The Pre-furred Choice

After SSSS: Gridman, the studio Trigger did their next original work directed by Little Witch Academia creator Yoh Yoshimari. BNA: Brand New Animal is a new take on the “animals living in the same city” that Zootopia made a bundle on. The downside to this is most anime fans initially saw this as a rip-off of Beastars, so it didn’t receive the attention it needed. This was written by Kazaki Nakashima that also wrote for Getter Robo, and the Batman: Ninja movies. BNA was a limited series, only 12 episodes long, but it got in, told an entire story, and got out in record time. The anime premiered on Netflix in 2020 along with a light novel and a one-shot manga. The show initially prospered when it premiered, although its fandom has settled down over the years, even among furries.

Set on an alternate Earth where certain humans are called beastmen because they can take on the form of an anthropomorphic animal. Humans and beastmen have been living together for thousands of years, but beastmen are trying to have their own town in Japan named Anima City in Japan, because that’s the only country that takes in this kind of messed up metropolis. This was established because beastmen receive discrimination and need a haven to thrive. The Japanese government agreed to this to keep beastmen away from human population.

The story stars young basketball fan Michiru who has somehow become a beastman, specifically a tanuki also referred to as a raccoon dog which according to Japanese mythology are trickster creatures with the ability to shapeshift. She darts to Anima City to seek refuge and a cure for her case which is called beastmanitis. Upon getting there, she comes across the stoic wolfman Shirou who is a special agent for the mayor that helps Michiru gain her citizenship. While getting used to her new home, Michiru discovers that she can morph parts of her body into different animal parts, such as wings, gorilla arms, and her tail can be used as a cushion for rough landings. These new abilities help her locate her missing friend Nazuna who also got beastmanitis and is currently acting as the idol for a religious factor called the Silver Wolf cult who worship a mystical giant wolf that has appeared throughout history to help beastmen. The true antagonist is Slyvasta whose pharmaceutical company is secretly working on an anti-beastman formula to permanently turn all the beastmen into regular humans.

Trigger brought their A-game when they were making BNA. There is fast-paced action and sparkling animation with literal sparkles, plus explosive colors. The characters in both humans and beastmen stand out and are particularly sharp and angular. The designs vary between sharp and lean but can change to being either musclebound hulks or cute fuzzy children. You can see a lot of the effort that was used to make productions like Promare and Gurren Lagann so iconic.

Comparisons of BNA to Beastars were inevitable as both shows feature life in a city full of anthropomorphic animals, although Beastars was set within its all-furry world, whereas BNA shares its world with the rest of humanity. Beastars social division stems from carnivores and herbivores trusting one not to eat the other, of which Zootopia also shares some aspects. BNA represents a more relatable discrepancy as the human prejudice for beastmen is clearly meant to replicate discrimination between races, sexes, and gender. Anyone who has any idea of the X-Men can see the similarities between the plight of mutants and how the beastmen are treated by humans. The animosity humans have is partially out of fear, but mostly due to them seeing beastmen as not even human but lower lifeforms.

When BNA first aired, Netflix premiered the first 6 episodes, with the remaining finishing out the series a few weeks later, and there is a tone shift with the second half where it gets deeper into political intrigue and government conspiracies. Instead of exploring Michiru’s transformation into a tanuki girl, the concluding episodes get bogged down in the doctrine of the Silver Wolf and how religion can be a double-edged sword giving people faith but also making them too reliant on what they believe and how they have trouble dealing with the reality of a critical situation. It’s possible that an extra episode would’ve given BNA enough room to lay out all its racial and religious allegories while showing the everyday life of an actual community of furry people.

BNA is an anomaly among Trigger’s productions like Kill La Kill as it steers away from a few anime tropes like gratuitous fan service or Dragonball-level fights, even though there is a big battle between two kaiju-sized wolves, one of which even has three heads like Ghidorah. There’s plenty to enjoy in this and the plot does move along swimmingly, although it has much more backstory and world building than a 12-episode series could handle. If this anime was given another season, it would have been able to accomplish what it set out to do. Michiru’s childhood friendship with Nazuna was borderline sapphic in the beginning, but we see that there was a bigger chasm between the two characters thus making any lesbian fangirls disappointed. Over the course of the series, you are given a satisfying watch with a fun anime with dynamic animation, but you’ll also feel a little left out as there was clearly more to this brand-new world than what we got.

MISC. MANGA, *Grendizer U: The Inception

Acting as the third stage of Go Nagai's Mazinger franchise, Grendizer (also known as Grandizer) took the giant robot epic to the stars and became a space opera up there with Captain Harlock and was so popular that it ended up in the Shogun Warriors toy line, plus the anime was part of Force Five. There is a Grendizer anime and manga that ran in the 70s, and then it was given a reboot in 2024 with a simultaneous anime and manga called Grendizer U, and the manga is titled Grendizer U: The Inception which takes place before the TV series. It's hard to say that it's a "prequel" per say as it was released at the same time as the anime. Go Nagai wrote this new interpretation and it was illustrated by 8 Key, although it's American release was by Titan Manga who instead of releasing a full-sized novel came out with a light thin book for the same price as a standard published manga.

The corrupt Vega Alliance has conquered a good portion of the galaxy along with the planet Fleed. Duke is a prince of the empire, and he is coming of age to take charge of the powerful robot defender Grendizer, but his right of succession is being blocked by his best friend/rival Gau Su, so the two of them have a duel to inherit the tile of official mecha meister. Gau Su wins the match by cheating and leaves Duke for dead as he takes Grendizer, but Duke survived and learns that his father the king caused the death of Gau Su's father. Duke reunites with Gau Su and vows to help him fight against the king, but an accident causes Gau Su to perish and Duke winds up on Earth with no memory of his past. Duke was conveniently found by Koji Kabuto, the pilot for Mazinger Z, along with fellow mecha driver Sayaka. They ask Duke to be part of their team even though he doesn't currently have robot of his own, but anyone reading this will figure out that he'll eventually get Grendizer back and help out in defending Earth.

The manga has a decent start, but the opening chapters take place on an alien world, and then the plot is dropped into the storyline of an adjacent mecha series, so there's a massive tone shift. 8 Key's artwork isn't as hard edged as Go Nagai's original art from the 70s, but it is effective for the first few chapters. Titan Manga's translation seriously lacks any emotion to it and needed some spicing up. Once more volumes of this comes out it will hopefully bear better fruit.

ANI-MOVIES, *Madagascar

After Schrek became a mainstay for DreamWorks, they were looking for their next cinematic franchise. In 2005, the first Madagascar film was put in theaters to a rising victory. Even though it's an original story, the concept borrowed quite a bit from various classic cartoons, specifically Tennessee Tuxedo and Hair Bair Bunch, plus plenty of callbacks to Looney Tunes. The conceprt was about zoo animals ending up in the wild, which turned out to be such an original idea that a year later Disney came out with their own hideously animated movie titled The Wild. The characters have a specific angular design to them which is a fresh take instead of trying to make them match an established motif. One thing that the film keeps dragging its feet over is the constant barrage of pop culture references, and the soundtrack is littered with incidental jukebox music. However, as an animated family film, it does reach what it's going for.

A quartet of animals at the Central Park Zoo in New York City are all buddies who despite whatever natural tendencies they have are all friends. The lion Alex is the zoo's star attraction, and his neighbors Gloria the hippo, Melman the giraffe, along with zebra Marty whose 10th birthday makes him wish to see what life is like outside the zoo. After four penguins plan to bust out of their captive habitat, Marty gets the idea to also go see the great wild world, so he takes a stroll out on the town, with his friends chasing after him which gets them all deported. The penguins take control of the freighter which lands the main characters on the coast of Madagascar, thus finally living up to the movie's title. After being greeted by a tribe of lemurs lead by the charismatic King Julien, the zoo castaways decide to stay, although this new change of scenery doesn't help Alex's carnivore cravings. The penguins eventually turn the freighter around to Madagascar and help introduce Alex to seafood which cures his want to eat his friends and seeing everyone as talking steaks. They all plan to head back to New York, although the film ends with no functioning ship to make the journey home, so that's where the sequels come in.

Madagascar lives up to its name for the second half of the movie, although it could've been titled something a little closer to the story like Zoo Break. The casting is on point, even if most of the actors were high profile stars at the time this came out instead of standard voice over veterans. The film contains vibrant animation, although the human designs look like rejected background characters from the first Incredibles movie. The entire film is an homage to spastic golden age cartoons in the spirit of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, so old school toon fans should appreciate it, and it's a great film for kids.