It was a funny coincidence when I spotted the Loups-Garous anime on fansub so soon after I’d bought a copy of the original novel. I was interested to see how the transition would go since the book’s an atmospheric and moody piece; the adaptation of Kyogoku’s Mouryou no Hako went through a couple of episodes where the wheels fell off for a while but it was still really disappointing to see Loups-Garous stumble so badly. I wish the staff who had worked on MnH had been given the chance to work on this one too, because that worked far better on screen than this did.
The novel laid the philosophy on quite thick but fortunately there’s enough going on in there to make for a decent movie from the SF and conspiracy-thriller aspects without exploring anything else too deeply. I actually think the film would’ve been bogged down with Kyogoku’s long-winded intellectual musings but even with a more digestible narrative it still falls flat and, oddly, seems to be aimed at a somewhat different audience from the source material.
I did think the setup and background was very well done though – the views of Hazuki’s home from the surveillance cameras and the little detail of printing the SVC logo on the side of buses set up the Big Brother society of the novel very effectively. The character designs for Hazuki, Ayumi and the counsellor Shizue were also exactly how I’d imagined they’d be; needless to say it’s subjective but I was pleasantly surprised at how the character designer’s visions of them were so similar to my own.
The rendering of Cat painted her as being slightly older than I imagined…I had an image in my head of someone who was around the same age as the other girls and, for some reason, looked a bit more destitute. I suppose there’s room for interpretation in aspects such as these, so I wasn’t bothered with how they were handled. Mio seemed much more jovial – excessively so – than I felt the book portrayed her…which is an appropriate juncture to start on where things began to go wrong.
My take on the novel’s worldview is that the characters are, by and large, socially maladjusted thanks to their generation’s isolation and reliance on technology. Hazuki for instance comes across as clumsy and stupid here, but she’s supposed to be representative of the kids in L-G and how they find understanding of their surroundings so difficult. There are numerous points in the novel that indicate regular use of hand-held monitors has a severe detrimental effect on people’s ability to judge things like direction and distance; Hazuki has impaired communication skills and sense of physical perspective thanks to the environment she grew up in. The more streetwise personalities of Mio and Ayumi are the exceptions rather than the rule.
One unforgivable change was merging the role of a side-character into Kunugi, the old police officer and ‘good guy’ who works alongside Shizue. In terms of streamlining what is after all a fairly long novel into one feature film, it does require some editing; I thought the way the movie shook up Ishida’s place in the story for example was really well done, since it built up to a tense finale that could leave even those of us who’d read the book surprised.
What the film did to Kunugi’s character however crossed the line. It required a complete U-turn of his morals and values since the loyalties of the side-character in question were the polar opposite: he came out of it in an unflattering light and that left a bad taste in my mouth.
The final act, which involves a showdown at SVC HQ (very reminiscent of the box-shaped lab in Mouryou no Hako, coincidentally), was the only part of the original novel’s narrative that really stretched the credibility factor for me: the idea of a high school girl being able to storm an entire building armed with a plasma rifle is a bit far-fetched, even if she’s a genius hacker. If that was implausible, imagine how much worse it would look if she was on board what can only be described as a robotic cuddly toy…I genuinely have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what the writers were thinking at this point. Why swap a decent concept that’s very cool and just about believable for something so ridiculous?
That reactionface is completely genuine and wholly appropriate
The fact that the film doesn’t make any attempt to dive into Kyogoku’s philosophical angle is perfectly understandable: it’s a necessary sacrifice in delivering a plotline that is able to move along and make sense to a casual moviegoer who hasn’t read the source material. It is however still a futuristic murder-mystery with a gruesome revelation at the end so dumbing it down and trying to lighten the mood earlier shouldn’t be on the agenda at all. Some of the moments of violence were also shown in graphic detail, which only made the contrast more jarring and baffling.
This makes me wonder: who exactly is this film made for? The novel is long, complex and takes a long time to build momentum; it’s thematically dark, mentally demanding and is very serious in tone. Just because it’s sensible for the film to be more accessible, that doesn’t mean it ought to pull proceedings in the direction of some sort of high school action show. The concept of communication was an important one, but someone decided to use that idea as an excuse for a breezy girly romp about friendship. WRONG.
I’m not suggesting it should’ve been as deadpan as the novel was, nor should it have retained those lengthy bits of dialogue where the characters stand around discussing moral issues – heck, that was heavy-going on paper! – but it doesn’t seem to want to be a convincingly dark murder-mystery either. Except, that’s what Loups-Garous fundamentally IS…there’s no way you can sugar-coat or sanitise this sort of tale without tearing the heart out of it, which is what has happened here.
I’m sorry this has turned into such a rant but it was a solidly-written story with a background that’s equally complex and has plenty to say on several levels…and yet the film somehow manages to completely ignore its strengths, misunderstand its intentions and deliver something totally different and very much inferior. I now feel like one of those Tsukihime diehards by beating my head on my desk and mumbling “THERE IS NO LOUPS-GAROUS ANIME” to anyone who will listen.
On the plus side, it’s made me appreciate the book more.