Anime has been popular around the world for decades, and is only getting more buzz in recent years. There’s an anime series for everyone out there, whether you’re brand new to the genre or an old hand who wants something strange and challenging.
But there are still many people out there who just aren’t interested in watching animation, for whatever reason. In that case, I’d be tempted to recommend some live-action remakes of anime movies and shows…if they weren’t so reliably terrible. There are near-universally celebrated anime series like Cowboy Bebop and Attack on Titan that have gotten dreadful live-action remakes. Ghost in the Shell is a classic anime sci-fi movie (that got a great animated side series), but the 2017 live-action movie with Scarlett Johansson is wretched. Dragon Ball is one of the most popular anime series ever produced, but the 2009 live-action movie Dragonball Evolution is famously awful.
There are many more examples like that. It seems like anime and live-action just don’t go together, but there are a few live-action remakes that break the mold, and it looks like the tide may be turning.
Rurouni Kenshin movies
Quality quintet
Rurouni Kenshin, an anime and manga series about a wandering warrior who uses his talents to protect the weak and downtrodden in Meiji-era Japan, was big in the 1990s, and a lot of fans were skeptical when it was announced that a live-action movie would be coming out in 2012. Much to their shock, the movie was rock solid, with action scenes that relied more on exciting fight choreography than expressive CGI, a plot that altered some things about the original without losing their spirit, and a soulful performance from Takeru Satoh in the title role.
Even more impressive, Satoh and director Keishi Ōtomo teamed up for an additional four films, all of which are shockingly watchable. Somehow, the producers managed to thread the needle and please fans of the manga and anime while changing just enough so that the story doesn’t seem absurd onscreen, with Takeru Satoh’s multilayered performance tying everything together.
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Alice in Borderland
Squid Game meets Lewis Carroll
Alice in Borderland is based on a manga of the same name by Haro Aso. It’s about a group of people who are transported into a desolate, alternate version of Tokyo where they must participate in dangerous, deadly games all themed around playing cards. The more games they win, the longer they can stick around and maybe find a way home. But if they lose…
The characters in Alice in Borderland are likable and layered, the games themselves are cleverly designed, and the tone is exaggerated and heightened without going so far over the top that it feels goofy. There was a brief Alice in Borderland OVA anime series before the live-action show came around, which is why it qualifies for this list, but the producers of the Netflix show are mostly drawing directly from the manga, which means they aren’t tempted to try and match the tone of an anime series. Anime as a genre is known for being heavily stylized in a way that works in animation but falls apart in live-action. Alice in Borderland is able to go its own way and comes out the other end better for it.
- Release Date
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2020 – 2025-00-00
- Network
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Netflix
- Directors
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Shinsuke Sato
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Kento Yamazaki
Ryohei Arisu
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Tao Tsuchiya
Yuzuha Usagi
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Nijiro Murakami
Shuntaro Chishiya
Alita: Battle Angel
From the scrapheap to the top of the heap
Alita: Battle Angel is an adaptation of a manga by Yukito Kishiro, which was also turned into an OVA anime series in the early ’90s. It’s about Alita, a cyborg who is found in a junkyard and brought back online by a kindly scientist. She sets out to explore a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world sharply divided between the haves and the have-nots.
This is the first big Hollywood movie on our list, and it’s just solid all around. The acting is solid, the action and special effects are solid, and you can tell that director Robert Rodriguez has actual affection for the source material and isn’t just trying to turn something out to cash in on the manga’s name.
- Release Date
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February 14, 2019
- Runtime
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122 minutes
- Director
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Robert Rodriguez
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Christoph Waltz
Dr. Dyson Ido
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Speed Racer
Just weird enough to work
A problem that a lot of anime-to-live-action adaptations have is that they either take the stylized nature of anime series too literally, which ends up looking ridiculous, or they veer so far away that the resulting adaptation barely seems connected to the source material. In 2008’s Speed Racer, directors the Wachowskis fully lean into the hyper-reality of the original Speed Racer anime, about a race car driver who zooms all over the world participating in races and fighting criminals. They bring their own vision to it, pushing things further than even the anime contemplated and ending up with a surreal, brightly colored daydream of a movie that has to be seen to be believed.
Speed Racer was widely panned at the time of its release, but has since undergone a reevaluation as people have come to appreciate how unique and bold it is.
- Release Date
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May 7, 2008
- Runtime
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135 Minutes
- Director
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Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable Chapter I
That this even turned off half-good is a miracle
Speaking of unique and bold, anime don’t get much more anime than Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, an anthology show about different members of the Joestar family, who use bizarre companions called Stands to fight in pitched battles. This 2017 live-action movie adapts the first several episodes from the show’s “Diamond Is Unbreakable” arc, and is notable for how completely it commits to the anime’s strangeness, right down to the main character’s impossible purple pompadour.
There’s a heightened earnestness to a lot of anime that often feels weird in live-action, since we expect real people to act a little less histrionically. This movie does it with a straight face. It isn’t perfect, but it’s remarkable that it captured even a little of the show’s strange tone.
- Release Date
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October 6, 2012
- Showrunner
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Crunchyroll, Netflix, Hulu
- Directors
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Naokatsu Tsuda
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Kazuyuki Okitsu
Jonathan Joestar
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Tomokazu Sugita
Joseph Joestar
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One Piece
But can it keep it up?
One Piece is one of the most popular manga and anime series to have ever existed; both of them have been running since the ’90s and have many millions of fans the world over. A poor live-action adaptation would be another failure in a long string of them, but a successful one would have enough visibility to potentially change the perception of live-action anime adaptations in general.
So far, Netflix’s live-action One Piece show has been successful. The casting for iconic characters like Monkey D. Luffy is spot-on, the budget is big enough for the story about pirates traveling dangerous seas to be brought to life in a believable way, and the scripts bear down on the relatable human dramas at the core of the story while incorporating enough of the original’s zany humor for us to remember its origins.
The second season of One PIece drops on Netflix on Tuesday, March 10. This one is a big deal, and may set the stage for what comes next.
- Release Date
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August 31, 2023
- Network
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Netflix
- Showrunner
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Matt Owens, Steven Maeda, Joe Tracz
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Iñaki Godoy
Monkey D. Luffy
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More live-action adaptations are coming
Last year, the Demon Slayer and Chainsaw Man movies were both major hits at the box office. Anime is gaining more ground, which means more live-action adaptations are on the way. Hopefully they’ll learn the right lessons from these successes and soon we’ll forget that such adaptations ever had a bad reputation.
