A New Environment

            Over the weekend, I happened to watch the first three episodes of Persona 5: the Animation. If you’ve been reading this blog regularly (or if you know me well), you probably know that I think very highly of Persona 5, and you might be surprised that I’ve yet to watch the anime, but if anything my fondness for the original work led me to avoid the adaptation. Anime adaptations of books, games, and the like have a somewhat better track record than movie adaptations—which is mostly a product of having more screen time to work with—but they can still be sketchy.
            The first three episodes of Persona 5’s adaptation are passable but not excellent. I don’t love the animation style, and the events of the show play out at a breakneck pace in order to keep up with the game, which can be confusing when watching. Rather than delving into weak adaptations, though, I’d like to examine a few adaptations that are especially strong in order to hopefully shed some light on what makes an adaptation successful.
            The “simple” approach to making a strong adaptation is just to mirror the original work exactly. For a good example of this, look to The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, an adaption of the fourth book in the Haruhi Suzumiya series. Disappearance is the longest animated movie ever made (unless you count the long cut of the fourth Space Battleship Yamato movie, which wins out by a few seconds), and it uses its time to go more-or-less line by line through the novel. It’s an obsessively faithful adaptation, and it pairs this with a willingness to slow down and draw out moments of silence. As a result, it’s possibly my favorite movie period, just by virtue of being a faithful adaptation of a great novel.
            It also uses Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie #1” in its score, which is always a plus.
            The biggest weakness with Disappearance actually stems from its faithfulness to the original work—specifically, as it is an adaptation of the fourth book in a series, it isn’t particularly accessible to an audience unfamiliar with the earlier books. There’s an animated adaptation of the events leading up to Disappearance as well, and watching that solves the issue, but it does mean the movie doesn’t necessarily stand alone particularly well.
            Persona 4: the Animation provides a more interesting example of a strong adaptation of an original work. Given the absurd length of the original Persona 4, the adaptation doesn’t have the luxury Disappearance does of adhering strictly to the original script. Unlike the early episodes of Persona 5, though, Persona 4 handles this transition smoothly, maintaining a good sense of pacing while still conveying the important points of the game’s story.
            Persona 4 benefits from a director with a lot more experience, and it shows. Kishi Seiji has directed a wide range of truly excellent shows, from Angel Beats, to Hamatora, to Assassination Classroom. Kishi demonstrated a willingness with Persona 4 to break from the direct events and dialogue of the original game. This is a huge risk as far as adaptations are concerned, and even in the adaptations Kishi himself has directed it doesn’t always work—the Persona 3 movies do the same thing and generally fall flat, for example. For Persona 4, though, it works spectacularly.
            Video games are somewhat more difficult to adapt as movies or animated series than books or comics are due to their player interaction and intrinsic non-linearity. In Persona 4 specifically, the player controls a silent protagonist for the duration of the game, which means the animated series needed to essentially develop a unique characterization for a blank-slate protagonist—named Narukami Yu in the anime—and then represent a wide swathe of the things a potential player could do on a given playthrough.
            The early episodes of the anime are a bit bumpy, with the low-point being the episode that contains the character arcs for the minor characters Kou and Ai. Normally their character arcs would take place over the course of several in-game months, at the leisure of the player, and condensing them into a single episode is rather ineffective. In a sense, their stories are taken too literally, and they have a similar problem to the Persona 5 adaptation in that it moves much too quickly. Ai and Kou are both strong characters in the original game, but in the anime Ai comes across as extremely shallow (and annoying), while Kou ends up being pretty forgettable.
            Fortunately, the show learns from its mistakes and avoids a repeat of that particular episode. Most of the anime focuses on the direct main plot elements from the game—which are generally well-executed, as is typical of Kishi’s work—but then at about the halfway point it revisits the side-story concept. Episodes 13 and 14 combined form a two-part episode: “A Stormy Summer Vacation.” This sequence roughly corresponds to the character arcs for a whopping five of the game’s minor characters, plus Nanako, the protagonist’s younger cousin. Rather than trying to squeeze the actual character stories from the game into this short timeframe, these episodes present an entirely unique story not present in the game itself. While this could have easily gone poorly, the result is probably my favorite part of the entire show—to the extent that I recommend those who play the game to also watch at least those two episodes just because of how fun they are.
            The first of the two episodes is entirely from Nanako’s perspective. She sees Yu engaging in suspicious activities over his summer vacation, and she decides to dress up as Magical Detective Loveline, in reference to a fictional in-universe TV show. The episode has Nanako join with the other members of the Investigation Team (Persona 4’s main cast) to figure out what Yu is up to. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense initially, but Nanako is such a likable character pretty much any scene with her hanging out with the Investigation team has a wholesomeness it’s impossible to dislike.
            The payoff, though, comes in the following episode, which shows the same period of a few weeks from Yu’s perspective. In the space of twenty-some minutes, the episode provides answers for all of the questions raised in the episode prior (many of which are hysterical) while also breezing through the five side-characters’ story arcs. Yu spends the weeks frantically racing back and forth between the five characters, helping them with their individual problems, all because he more-or-less is unable to say no to any of them.
            The brilliance of these two episodes cannot be understated. While they are a thoroughly entertaining standalone story with no direct grounding in the original game, they actually represent the game better than a direct adaptation would. They capture the time-management element of the game’s Social Link system in a linear narrative format, which is quite impressive, and they provide important development for Nanako in particular that’s otherwise skimmed over in the service of advancing the show’s main plot beats. They also characterize Yu brilliantly, showing his desire to help others, his close relationship with Nanako, and (most importantly) his fabulous sense of humor.
            Yu’s characterization is a triumph of the Persona 4 adaptation. His personality, while totally new to the anime, doesn’t feel out of place or overbearing—it’s entirely natural despite being entirely original. He’s still mostly a blank slate in that he has relatively little in terms of personal stakes, and his role is mostly as a facilitator for the development of the other characters, which is in keeping with the game. The anime brings an understated humor to this, though, that’s absolutely wonderful.
            Yu is almost always straight-faced. His tone is level, and he’s exceptionally calm. This could easily lead to a boring or one-note character, but Persona 4 avoids this through a combination of irony and context. Yu often responds to situations with a hyper-serious melodrama that contrasts strongly with the mundane nature of most of Persona 4. While the anime should probably be classified as supernatural detective fiction, the meat of it is spent on the daily lives of its characters in the small town of Inaba. The protagonist’s universally stoic demeanor means he approaches murder investigations with the same projected sincerity as he brings to a summer afternoon spent fishing.
For a character with few facial expressions, he’s remarkably expressive, and it’s easy to tell whether his seriousness is genuine or feigned—what comes across in one context as intensity reads in another as amusement at the absurdity of daily life. Both types of situations earn his full attention and effort, but the emotion behind them is entirely different. For serious scenes, it feels as if Yu is meeting the plot with the appropriate degree of care, while in lighter scenes his melodrama both energizes the other characters and diffuses tension. His unflagging level of effort pushes the other characters on, while the self-aware silliness of it all keeps them from getting too caught up in their daily minutiae.
            The end result of this is that Yu is a highly likable character. Two other characters—Yosuke and Naoto—still drive much of the plot, as they do in the game, but Yu becomes the emotional and thematic backbone for the rest of the cast, which mirrors the protagonist’s role in the game and doesn’t get in the way of the existing story.
            The takeaway here is that if an adaptation doesn’t have the time or capability to be literally true to the original work, it can still work exceptionally well so long as any changes made stem from the purpose of the original. The summer episodes don’t come from the game, but they feel as if they could have. Their central conceits—Nanako’s precociousness and her affection for her cousin, Yu’s demanding schedule, the melodramatic urgency of the mundane—all stem directly from the original game. Similarly, while the protagonist’s personality is new to the anime, his role is nearly identical to that of the silent protagonist in the game, and his behavior and attitude are reflective of how many players approach directing his actions. As a result, he blends perfectly into the story despite being essentially a new addition.
            When you look at other adaptations that change things from their source material and remain strong, you see a similar pattern. The Kara no Kyoukai films, for example, change a number of elements from the original novel, and yet all but one of them feel like faithful adaptations. They adhere to the concepts and thematic ideas behind the original work, and adapting for the screen becomes less a matter of directly converting the novel’s words to a visual medium and more a matter of creating a movie that embodies the heart of the work.
            To go in the complete opposite direction, the Sword Art Online adaptation (which is widely panned and has turned many people off of ever looking at the books, sadly) makes a number of changes for entirely the wrong reasons. The adaptation focuses on providing a literal representation of the action of the novels while completely ignoring the thematic significance of everything that happens (most of which is contained in the novels’ narration). You’re left with what looks like a generic action series with characters who seem either too perfect (Kirito or Asuna) or whose motivations are confusing (such as the many female characters who have implied romantic connections to Kirito in the anime where no such relationship exists in the novels).
            I would actually argue that thematic adherence is more important than complete matching of the literal elements of a work. Disappearance, for example, works not because it follows the book’s text directly, but rather because the book’s literal events are themselves largely metaphorical, and therefore representing them visually intrinsically covers the thematic purpose of the book. Where Sword Art Online’s narration is pivotal to understanding how its characters think and why they do what they do, Haruhi’s narrator often narrates contrary to how he feels, meaning the narration itself gives less thematic insight than the characters’ actions do. Haruhi’s narration characterizes the protagonist, but dialogue accomplishes the same purpose in Disappearance, and the meat of the work lies in the outward decisions the characters make over the course of the story.
            I hope Persona 5’s adaptation gets better as it goes, but I’m not holding my breath. At least it isn’t offensively bad like Sword Art Online’s is. Enough of Persona 5’s thematic ideas are buried in its overt literal symbolism that even a direct-but-poorly-paced adaptation is likely to capture them passably. A weak-but-literally-accurate adaptation is preferable to one where changes are made that devalue the original work. Not every adaptation can be Persona 4.