In recent years, I have done myself the grand disservice of repeatedly imagining what an animated version of the recent HUNTERxHUNTER story arcs would look like in my ideal world. So divert your eyes--I feel some verbal vomit coming up, and there'll probably be a few spoilery bits amongst the utter bile!
My ideal adaptation would discard the typical, jaunty-coloured guff of Greed Island in favour of a more subdued and sinister aesthetic redolent of the first series and the first OVA, for example. The director--Furuhashi--would be looking beyond the perfunctory character designs of the manga whose simplicity and lack of impact were born out of the author's own circumstances; instead, he would apportion emphasis chiefly on the malign undercurrents of the story, illustrating them through unsettling visuals and depicting very clearly all the "blacked out" violence of the manga.
The story would profit from subtle rearrangements in the depiction of sequences, desiring to introduce, execute, and conclude the saga in a cohesive and more thoroughly resonant manner that befits and supersedes Togashi's potential comment on the nature of dictatorships and whatever. As with the first 62 episodes and subsequent OVA, the silences of the manga would be sounded out and explored more consciously; the deeper insight into Kurapika's character in the first series, notably--with all its original dialogue and exhibition of his mental ambulations--demonstrates what an animated adaptation of a series should do to flesh out a manga and enable it to feel more natural. Furuhashi and HUNTERxHUNTER's writers were not afraid to flex their creative muscles on the series--something that some may find offensive and undesirable--yet the sensitivity and maturity with which they did so reflected very much the effort for cleverness that Togashi visibly seeks to inject in his manga. Appending scenes and carefully rearranging sequences was no detriment to HUNTERxHUNTER; it was a necessary complement to underscore the shrewd tendencies of the author's style of story-telling, much in the same way the anime's immaculate and evocative backdrops--see the bruised, wispy purples and blues of the sky with golden solar flares in Gon & Killua's final twilit scene with their mentor Wing--added feeling to the scant backgrounds of the manga. In a world where Gon is shown to be so atavistic and at one with nature, it is apt that we should see it depicted with such feeling here, and end up feeling as he does.
In keeping with the visual leap from the vivacious to the maudlin, the show's musical score would switch from the faux-video game vibes of Greed Island to the grander, more orchestral leanings of the initial series. The original composer would return to retain the signature motifs behind music concerned with the show's characters, yet he would aspire to illustrate the more forthcoming bildungsroman trait of this story-arc by darkening, for example, Gon's musical anthems. Gon was no stranger to atrocities in prior arcs, but it is here that he is introduced to--and urged not to direct his gaze away from--some affectingly dreadful crimes. His initially upbeat character tune would be transmuted into something whose uplifting tempo is made more confused and agitated as he is subjected to the atrocities of the Chimera Ants--his response to the disturbing human dogs of chapter 192 is particularly vehement--and as he is instructed to become more unfeeling by Kite. The music would discernibly explore his previously underplayed "walking of a fine line" that Zepile alluded to many volumes prior, further. The cutesy character designs of Gon and Killua have a purpose: they emphasise the youth and naivety of the characters and their brighter perspective of things; they are uneasily offset, in the manga, against some realistic character designs which emphasise the darker realities of the world. Darkening musical themes would stress the entrance of these younger characters into a less adventuresome world--one that will get to them in ways that they have not experienced in erstwhile stories.
But then I realise that this upcoming series will maybe be a wee bit uninspired and naff, like Greed Island: Final, which I personally hail to be so woeful that I weep a little when I eat dinner in the evenings--which makes my kidney beans all soggy.
