Ark said:
Okay, so I saw Battle Royale about a month ago and HG yesterday. Overall, I enjoyed them both but prefered HG for the subtle commentary on power and also I found the romance quite charming.
Has anyone else noticed that the Japanophiles are going ape **** over this film because they see it as a rip off of BR? Many of them even say that they haven't seen both films or even either. I'm so sick of this whole "Japanese media is great and all western media is garbage" thing. It's like this is their territory and they have to defend it.
Okay, let's have some fun with this.
First up, there is nothing separate about the Japanese and American film, TV, music, animation, and comic/manga industries. In some cases they are the same companies (e.g. Sony) doing the same kind of things in both countries. The shared history goes right back too. Creative people from those industries in both countries have been 'borrowing' and learning from each other on a large scale since at least the early C20th.
I left the UK out of that, but the same is true for us. We have been involved in the same kind of process with both countries.
It's not just us either. The French for example. Hollywood has remade French movies in the same way as they remake Japanese movies. The French have also borrowed from the Americans.
So why do (mostly young male) people get so hung up on rubbishing America for 'ripping off' Japanese things? Short answer is that they don't know the history.
Now let's take a look at Battle Royale. First off, it was a novel. A novel which was critical of Japanese culture, and which was essentially a 'teenage freedom' story. Has there ever been any such story in the USA or here before Battle Royale? Oh yes. The Americans actually invented the idea of the teenager and a big shift in culture and cultural products soon followed. It may seem odd but before roughly the 1950s there was no such concept as the teenager. People just went from being children to being working adults. Nothing in between. But by the late 1960s we had caught the same cultural turn and were turning out 'teenager' material in vast abundance too. Why not look back at some of our own?
Take a look at a film called
If from 1968 if you get the chance.
http://www.imdb.co.uk/title/tt0063850/
And Read Anthony Burgess' novel
A Clockwork Orange from 1962. You can watch Kubrick's film of the book too if you like.
Want something from the USA? Watch Rebel Without A Cause (1955) and see something of the start of 'the teenager'.
http://www.imdb.co.uk/title/tt0048545/
So in both the UK and the USA there have been plenty of novels and films about 'teenage' problems and adult's crushing the life out of teenagers from decades before Battle Royale was published. Do you suppose that any of them had some influence in making Battle Royale possible or even shaping it beyond what might be possible from just relying on Japanese cultural heritage and products?
As for The Hunger Games, I got the impression that the film was a pretty hollowed out version of the books. I haven't read the books, but I would not be surprised if they were a lot better than the film was. It's certainly true that the original Battle Royale novel is much better than the manga (worthless rubbish) and the film (Takeshi Kitano overacting and improvising whilst still looking bored and uninterested in the film) so if there is any comparison to be made it ought to be between the books rather than the films.
I hope that opens things up a bit for you.
