My first exposure to the works of Kinoko
Nasu was through the abysmal 2003 JC Staff anime of the Visual Novel Tsukihime,
at the time I thought it was pretty cool. Then I played the Visual Novel; my
score for the anime dropped from eight to three.
How could they have turned such an amazing
story into the fucking mess that was the anime Shingetsutan Tsukihime? Trying
to combine five different story arcs that all last about twenty five hours into
one 13 episode series probably didn’t help.
Things didn’t fair much better in 2005,
when the second game made by Nasu’s company; Type-Moon, got an anime by Studio
Deen. The visual novel at the time was not translated into English so the only
thing I had to go on was the anime, I thought it was decent. The anime had 24
episodes instead of 13, so it fared a bit better in terms of adaption, or so I
thought.
A few years after I saw the anime I learned
the Visual Novel was translated (at this time only two of the three routes were
completed) so I found myself a copy and sat down to play it. Fifty hours later
and I’d thrown the anime in the trash, it wasn’t as bad as Tsukihime’s anime
but it wasn’t good either.
The Fate/Stay Night anime was followed up
by a movie of the second route of the Visual Novel, Unlimited Blade Works (The
2005 anime loosely following the plot of the first route, Fate.) it wasn’t good
but it wasn’t terrible either, it just sort of exists.
This background is all to show that
Type-Moon has been extremely unlucky with adaptations of their work for a long
time, or so I thought. After Fate/Stay Night and before the UBW movie, a studio
called Ufotable started a movie series of Nasu’s oldest published work, Kara no
Kyoukai; a light novel series.
It’s Amazing, I don’t know how I didn’t
find out about it until 2014, it deserves more recognition then it has.
Ufotable has quickly become “the type-moon
guys”, producing incredible adaptations of all of Kara no Kyoukai and the Fate
Prequel light novel written by Gen Urobuchi.
Now come to present day, and they have
started to adapt the second route, Unlimited Blade Works for a second time. Now
however it’s a full TV anime and not a movie. It’s incredible, the animation
work is their best yet, the story follows the beat of the VN as best you can in
an anime; but it’s not enough for some people.
A vocal minority on sites like
myanimelist.net have taken to calling it “terrible” or “not canon” because it dares
to be slightly different from the Visual Novel.
Anything short of a 1 to 1 translation of
the novel would be met by endless shitstorms about it, interfering with anyone
who actually wants to talk about the show legitimately.
I can only imagine that these guys want a
50 episode long anime that is 90% characters thinking, because that’s what a
direct translation of the novel would be like. You see, they seem completely, delusionally unaware of one simple fact; Anime and Visual Novels are different mediums.
A Visual novel is essentially a book with a
few pictures, sound, and sometimes voice acting, played on a PC or game
console. Like a Book, its pace is largely dictated by user input. How fast are
you reading? How much at one time?
Anime on the other hand, has to be paced according
to episode; you can’t start an episode on slice of life, go into an epic fight
in the middle then end on more slice of life, the pace would be all over the
place.
Ufotable understands this, so they
shorten/extend scenes in order to give the anime a good, steady pace; while
also providing more exposition, backstory, or callbacks to Fate/Zero.
But the angry fanboys don’t care; they were
calling this anime ruined before it even started, because the main character
Shirou, had a jacket. That’s right, changing a minor character design
detail got them to call the anime ruined.
Unlimited Blade Works TV is currently one
of if not the only anime adaption of something else that changes things
and gets better for it.
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