ilmaestro said:
Joshawott said:
The David Yates Harry Potter films were pretty poor adaptations of the novels (I'd say it's justified to compare them to what J.C. Staff did with Shakugan no Shana), but should that mean we discount all adaptations of books too?
Nah, the David Yates ones were ridiculously
good adaptations of the novels, considering both their limitations as novels in the first place, and how off-the-chart hard it is to actually produce a decent adaptation of any books like that. I'd like to hear more about your comparison with the Shana anime, though, since I haven't read the Shana LNs.
Also, you are p.much correct if the conclusion you draw is "**** movie adaptations of books" in general, because almost all of them aren't as good as the original work anyway.
The main comparison I draw between the Shana novels/anime and the Harry Potter novels/films is that, especially in the last Shana season, events from earlier books that were cut out of their adaptation would be referenced later on as if we're supposed to know about it (For example, Harry wanting to be an Auror was a big part of the Order of the Phoenix book, but absent from the film, as well as the whole Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs thing, only for Peter to be referred to as Wormtail in the next film). Likewise in the Shana 3 anime, we had the Hyakki Yakou appearing and Sale's
relationship with Dantalion randomly thrown in with no real explanation yet treated as if we're supposed to know).
My biggest gripe with the David Yates films has to be with the way he handled Deathly Hallows - by cutting out the whole subplot with Remus Lupin running away from Tonks because he was frightened that their child might be born a werewolf. In fact, his whole handling of the relationship between Lupin and Tonks was pretty diabolical; if memory serves me well, they cut out all mention of it aside from Tonks trying to announce
her pregnancy at Pivet Drive at the start of Deathly Hallows, but that subject is never touched on again in the films until Teddy is referred to by name in the
Resurrection Stone scene - and
Teddy Lupin is even cut from the epilogue.
I mean sure, those points are relatively minor in the series' overall and as you say, it's hard to properly adapt something like that for film - especially considering the length of the later Harry Potter books (and the sheer amount of Shana novels), but by leaving something out then referencing it later, it does leave holes that viewers will notice. So I would have either kept in as much as I could, or just removed them from the continuity altogether.
One thing I will give the earlier directors of Harry Potter though is, in the Shakugan no Shana anime's first season, they took the first two novels and squished them together. In an interview on the Philosopher's Stone BD, the producer did reveal that they were thinking of doing that...thank Arceus they didn't xD.
Due to Viz Media cancelling the Shana light novels (I'm still bitter about that >>), I haven't been able to read them beyond the second one - but as I watched Shana 3, I started to notice obvious holes and had a feeling that something was missing, so I scoured the internet to find out exactly
what was missing.
