Saturday, January 15, 2022

Book to Animation Ideas

 Okay I’m sorry if this doesn’t come out early Saturday morning like usual. I came home from work Friday in a surprisingly goodish mood, which was kind of ruined when I turned on my computer and it needed an update, meaning that the computer was sitting with its metaphorical thumbs up its metaphorical butthole for over two hours and I couldn’t do jack about it.


So that was… fun.


I’ve been watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier though and it’s pretty good.



When I was coming up with ideas for Saturday Notes last week, I wrote out a bunch of books that I would like to see adapted, and from there I came up with last week’s topic. But video games are not the only ways to adapt books! I thought, what if we were to pick some books to adapt into animated projects: whether in shows or movies.


So here are some books (and comics) I read that I think would be good to adapt into animated projects of different kinds.


Bone by Jeff Smith was on the list, obviously, but that is already in the works (at Netflix, I think?) so that’s not going to be in this Note.


THE CRONUS CHRONICLES BY ANNE URSU - CGI animated movies


Have you read The Cronus Chronicles? I recommend you do it now. It’s pretty darn cool. The premise is that the Greek gods are real, only they went undercover and pushed themselves as ‘myths’ because it gets people to stop bothering them. They’ve survived up until modern day. And guess what? They’re massive douchebags (you knew this already). 


Welp, enter Charlotte Mielswetski, an eighth-grader who is just trying to get on with her life. And she stumbles upon the world of Greek gods when a demigod from the Underworld starts hounding her British cousin Zee, who moved over to her place after everyone around him got sick from a mysterious illness. 


It’s also really, REALLY funny, and full of weird jokes. Because our villain, Philonecron, is such a weirdo fashionista, and Charlotte would really rather have a normal life, and Zee would really rather play soccer, and the gods would really rather mortals butt out of their business.


So I think this would make a really good CGI cartoon film? A trilogy, like the book series, would be ideal, but at least one. It could use a unique art style to depict some of the really weird or disturbing imagery from the books in unique and silly ways. And I think CGI cartoons have a reputation for being more self-aware, and this kind of story can really do with that mindset going in.


AMERICAN BORN CHINESE BY GENE LUEN YANG - 2D animated movie with art in the style of the comic


I really, really love American Born Chinese. And also Boxers & Saints but that’s heavy and I had to pick one of the two to put on this list, so I went with this one. It tells three stories: one about Sun Wukong, the Monkey King from Journey to the West; one about Jin, a child of Asian immigrants trying to fit in while growing up in America; and one about Danny, a white kid embarrassed by his Chinese cousin. The three stories somehow tie together by the end in a way that feels surprising, but also organic.


I like it alot. I love stories that are both mythological and modern, and this one’s about immigration and identity and it’s really cool. And I think a large part of the appeal to me was that the art style sticks out. So I’d hate to see it in live-action when it could be adapted in a way that preserves the art. I’ve seen plenty of CGI animation now that does a good job of imitating 2D art, and that’s fine, but I think this would definitely work better as a traditional cartoon.


I also must insist that the voice talent be mostly Asian cast. There’s this weird thing with voice acting in that while it’s become more and more taboo to whitewash cast, it’s still pretty common in voice acting for white performers to play nonwhite characters. I would really rather this cast be made up of Asian-Americans.


RICKETY STITCH & THE GELATINOUS GOO BY JAMES COSTA AND JAMES PARKS - CGI animated movie


These comics are funny but also touching and sometimes surprisingly melancholy? For a story about a skeleton that wants to be a musician, and his friend who is a blob of goo, one wouldn’t expect this much effort in the story.


The art is colorful, the story is epic, and the backstory is weirdly dark and chilling and a little heartbreaking? Our lead is the only talking skeleton, and for whatever reason he’s got dreams about a lost city that fell to the forces of evil a long time ago. Again, I’d like the animation to hue closely to the art style, and show a lot of really weird figures, but this time in CGI as I think it fits both the tone and the art style of the comic better.


Also this movie has to be a musical. Look, every comic volume has at least one song in it, and I think with the idea that the main character is a stitch–a minstrel–you have no excuse NOT to make it a musical. Rickety isn't bad, either–in-universe he’s considered a very good musician and singer, though not a great actor.


DELILAH DIRK BY TONY CLIFF - 2D animation


You know what’s fun? A lady running around with swords, completely unapologetic about the fact she’s out to find some treasure. She wants to always have wild adventures, and because he makes such great tea she befriends Selim, a former Janissary who would rather just not deal with people shooting at them all the time. They travel the world going on adventures, sometimes with a flying boat. It’s good fun. It’s the kind of thing that might look pretty ridiculous in live-action, but I think as an animated feature it’d be perfect.


Think about it! An adventure in the early 1800’s where there’s two leads globe-trotting, treasure-hunting, sword fighting, gun fighting, and escaping from prisons! I don’t think the comics ever really got that dark, though there are some bits of serious drama. Still, I think most of the time the story would prioritize the fun of the original comic rather than turn it into something gritty or realistic.


Okay I know I have a thing against celebrity voice actors, but: Keira Knightley as Delilah and Said Taghmaoui as Selim. I don’t know why this casting came into my head, but some time after reading the comic I had that thought and I can’t quite get rid of it.


MOUSE GUARD BY DAVID PETERSEN - stop-motion animated movie, or CGI meant to look like it


This was going to be a movie from 20th Century Fox until Disney bought Fox and dropped it like a hot potato. I don’t know exactly how they were planning to adapt it, but live-action is obviously not it. It’s a story about a bunch of anthropomorphic mice wielding swords; a bit difficult to pull off with animation.


And you know what we don’t see enough of? Stop-motion animation. So I propose that the film either be stop-motion, or be animated to look like it. This is a story about kingdoms of talking mice, sure, but there’s something about it that feels very real. Each volume has notes about how the kingdoms work, how the architecture was built. And I think that in order to honor the comic, you can’t have environments that look artificial. Having these places be actually built would be a good way to translate that into a screen format.


Also the mice are very fuzzy and having that be obvious would be really cool. I want to see the fuzz. Fuzzy mice.


PIRANESI BY SUSANNA CLARKE - something surreal


I don’t know exactly what kind of animation would be best for this. I lean towards 2D animation, but I wouldn’t mind as long as the style is… a little bit surreal. Strange. Haunting, maybe.


The story goes like this: Piranesi is a man who lives in a world that consists of a giant house filled with statues. It’s so big that some rooms have tides come in. Piranesi keeps track of the layout of the house and how often the tides come in, so he knows how to safely avoid them. Aside from occasional birds, he’s only got one friend in there, another person called the Other. But he soon discovers that there’s someone else who has been exploring the house, and he doesn’t know if it’s a friend or foe, and begins to question everything he ever knew.


I don’t think there’s that much that’s overtly scary, but I think that if you were adapting that to film, you wouldn’t want to make that clear. You’d want to have big open, dark spaces with statues and tides that audiences would look at suspiciously. A feeling of foreboding and grimness, like you really don’t know what’s going to happen in these rooms, if there is some sort of monster or murderer, or something unexpected, going to pop out at any moment to terrorize Piranesi.


It shouldn’t necessary be scary, but it should be unsettling.


SQUIRE’S TALES BY GERALD MORRIS - 2D animated movies with style imitating medieval art


See, these stories are silly, in a way that I don’t think live-action would quite do justice. Though I wouldn’t mind that, I think the stories would be better in animation.


Based on King Arthur stories, Gerald Morris uses characters often shunted to the side (squires, ladies, less-famous knights). He tells a lot of lesser-known stories, or well-known ones, satirizing the things that he absolutely hates, like the love triangles and suicidal bravery nonsense. The thing is that Morris clearly knows his stuff, because he makes references to fairly obscure Arthurian stories in his books.


So, thinking about stuff like Secret of the Kells, which has its design built so heavily on medieval Irish monastic art. And I think something like that would be the best approach to adapting medieval stories: using medieval art to tell about these characters, but do it in a way that emphasizes both how silly the characters are and how silly the art could be.


I don’t necessarily believe that if this ever got made they would need to do every book, or even do them in order. Many of them are only tangentially related to each other. So whether or not the first one is adapted, or something like The Ballad of Sir Dinadan, I suspect it would turn out fine no matter what, if the makers knew what they were doing.


THE GRAVEYARD BOOK BY NEIL GAIMAN - 2D or stop-motion movie


Maybe this one is already in development? I don’t know. I thought I heard that somewhere.


Considering the success of Coraline as an adaptation, I think another Neil Gaiman book is in order? And this could be live-action, but the gist of it is that it’s The Jungle Book but in an English graveyard. The main character interacts with an awful lot of ghosts, and sees things like ghouls and what appears to be the incarnation of Death herself. So why not make it animation? You’re already showing us something fantastical and unrealistic.


Stop-motion animation would be good, but I’m scared that it would just be compared to both Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas, regardless of whether or not it really looked like those movies. 2D animation would also be a good option, as long as it looks… spooky. Not scary, necessarily, but the perfect kind of movie to watch for Halloween. There would definitely be some scarier parts of the film, but overall I want it to be spooky fun.


There’s also a musical number in there. Right from the book. Make sure to put that in the movie.


And absolutely no one should ever be explicit about Silas’s true nature.



And that’s what I got! I am sorry if this is a bit rushed because I didn’t have that much time on Friday night to finish it.

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