Actions Adapted

For long time fans of action series, we are all used to characters yelling out the name of their skills, before activating that said skill, or side characters standing around for minutes just explaining what their skill does. While this certainly isn’t a huge deal, I sometimes find the flow of actions rather stifled when these scenes are brought to life in animation form.

Probably the most well known jutsu in Naruto.

For people who know anything about anime at all, they will know that mangas are one of the largest source for anime adaptations. Popular series such as Attack on Titan, Fullmetal Alchemist and Naruto all originated from Mangas. When drawn on paper, action scenes are meant to look very fluid. In the image above where we see Naruto casting his shadow clone jutsu, we get the sense that he is yelling the words “Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!” and casting the jutsu simultaneously.

But in anime, when this scene is recreated, we get a sort of delay between yelling his skill’s name, and then casting this skill. This problem is extra aggravating when you take into consideration times where fight scenes and expositions happen alongside one another: let’s say Naruto casted a completely new skill that the viewers have never seen before. In order to let us know what the skill does, the author normally have some other characters on sidelines giving explanations. In manga, when in one page, a panel shows Naruto casting his skill, and in another panel, a side character explains what his skill does, you get the sense that these things are happening simultaneously, because you read panels in a split second, and everything feels like it’s happening very fast.

In anime, to show everything, there will be a back-and-forth between characters fighting and other characters explaining their skills, one scene after the another. So the whole fight seem to be constantly pausing for dialogues, and the intensity of the scene just diminishes. This problem only further escalates when action scenes are adapted from novels, because novels tend to use a lot of monologue.

For this reason, I would really recommend anybody who is a fan of action animes to search for the original manga / novel, and see if your experience would improve from seeing how each scene is enacted on paper, rather than on screen.

(Casey)