The Unfilmable Masterpiece

From Manben NEO documentary

 

 

Reading Naoki Urasawa’s words, I can’t help but nod my head in agreement. His reasoning is that the panels are so perfect that any adaptation would have to follow them slavishly to be successful. Well, most manga adaptations take great care in using the manga panels as ‘storyboards’.

I believe there are other reasons why Blood On The Tracks cannot be adapted. I won’t lie, though: there’s a small part of me with a morbid curiosity for what an adaptation would be like… Years ago, I saw a photograph of a little kid who reminded me of Seiichi and I felt my heart do a backflip in my chest… I don’t think I could last two minutes of an adaptation. 

Blood On The Tracks can’t be faithfully adapted to the screen without breaching serious ethical boundaries.

Fans certainly expect that any successful manga will eventually get an anime/tv show/movie adaptation, and indeed, many of Shūzō Oshimi’s mangas have been adapted to the screen, most notably, Aku no Hana. 

Aku no Hana is about to receive its 3rd live-action adaptation. Previous adaptations were bad for different reasons, notably having adult actors playing teenage characters. The tv series that is set to begin in April this year is about to repeat that mistake.

To think that Blood On The Tracks can be adapted quickly, easily or even accurately is naïve, to say the least.

You see, Aku no Hana is similar in spirit to William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies (a work which also received its 3rd adaptation this year with a mini-series on BBC).

The themes are quite different, but it all comes down to children hurting children, which is disturbing enough. Lord Of The Flies (in all adaptations) had real child actors playing the characters. In all its adaptations, Aku no Hana uses adult actors to play pubescent characters. Even if the adaptations had been 100% accurate with regard to storytelling, the fact that it used adults instead of children basically nullifies the effort to adapt Oshimi’s story, and especially the disturbing notion of children hurting other children.

Blood On The Tracks, on the other hand, is a haunting exploration of emotional and physical abuse from a mother to her own son, bringing to light the pervasive trauma caused by controlling and abusive parental figures, which makes this manga closer in spirit to a work like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Lolita also had two theatrical adaptations, both of which highly unfaithful, if you consider the ethical conundrums related to depicting child abuse in such a visually explicit medium. 

In any case, it’s safe to say that the horrific experience of reading Lolita is magnified tenfold when you read Blood On The Tracks. Vladimir Nabokov has ways of defusing (minimizing) the horror by setting the story in the past ,and writing it from the point of view of a villain trying hard to make himself better than the monster he really is. Blood On The Tracks has no such “horror shock absorbers”. The manga is told from the point of view of the victim, as the abuse is taking place, and the audience is forced to live the experiences as he’s living them. Much more horrific as a reading experience, if you ask me. 

So, what are the challenges of adapting a story like Blood On The Tracks? Well, the manga is told entirely from the point of view of a child who lives in a perpetual state of fear and confusion which Oshimi neither sanitizes nor sensationalizes. The rhythm of the manga is deliberately slow, allowing for a lingering dread to build with each new page. The tension relies on a methodical buildup, and without this, any adaptation would lose the nuanced horror Oshimi seeks to create in his work.

Film and anime are often limited in their capacity to sustain this kind of nuanced, internal tension, without resorting to more obvious visual and auditory cues. An adaptation might fall into the trap of focusing too much on plot-driven actions, distorting the story’s subtle exploration of childhood trauma and emotional abuse. On the page, these themes are largely communicated through the pacing, stillness, and panel after panel of body language. Seiko’s psychological manipulations become difficult to convey effectively in film or anime, where it risks being either underdeveloped or sensationalized. In a manga so full of compelling micro-expressions, that are masterfully frozen on each panel, how would a director convey that on screen (either in animation or live-action)?

These technical challenges may seem unsurmountable, but I could imagine that, in the right hands, the manga could successfully make the transition from page to screen. Heck, we’re living in a world where Uzumaki had a proper anime adaptation (though it’s up for debate how successful it was), so it can be done! Hiroshi Nagahama directed a perfect first episode, after failing to adapt Aku no Hana years before.

Blood On The Tracks would need a dream team of animation directors, producers, storyboard artists, key animators, voice actors and soundtrack composers to make it come alive… Maybe Oshimi would need to be involved in some capacity; maybe he could be credited as a storyboard artist and be in charge of the rhythm of the story... Maybe Oshimi could just learn how to animate himself…

Hey, don’t laugh, dreaming is not taxed yet!

Blood On The Tracks is not an action-oriented manga and therefore wouldn’t be a very movement-oriented anime. It could work well if the emphasis of the animation would be on characters’ reaction shots. Subtle animation combined with a sober soundtrack could work really well on-screen. The 2006 anime adaptation of Ai Yazawa’s NANA comes to mind: it was a great adaptation with very little movement, but it has amazing music by Tomoki Hasegawa and inspired animation. 

So, let’s assume a great animation team could be put together for this project, studio Ghibli, maybe, or a studio of that caliber, with an awesome director, a great composer, and close cooperation with Shūzō Oshimi himself. What would they do regarding the voice actors? This, to me, will always be what throws a wrench in the whole deal.

Because there would be two ways of doing this, and both of them would be a disaster. Either the director chooses adult voice actors who can actually sign a contract, understand the weight of the events, and the devastating emotional effect it has on the audience, and act accordingly, or he would try to hire children (to enhance the horror, perhaps). None of these choices would be a good one… for separate reasons… but only one of them would be completely unethical.

The anime industry is filled with teenage male protagonists played by voice actresses like Son Goku being played by Masako Nozawa, and Edward Elric being played by Romi Park. Women voicing teenage boys is not the exception, it’s the rule. It’s awfully rare to have teenage boys voicing teenage characters, mainly because their voices tend to change around this time. A very noticeable example is Aaron Dismuke, who played Alphonse Elric in the 2003 adaptation. After his voice changed, he was replaced by Maxey Whitehead in Brotherhood. If one is looking for consistency in the character, having a 12-year-old boy whose voice is changing is a big no-no. And nobody complains when Nancy Cartwright has been voicing Bart Simpson for nearly 40 years. The quality of the performance is what matters most. 

While not common, having child actors playing child characters is not as unusual as it seems. Walt Disney has been doing it since Pinocchio, when the title character was voiced by 12-year-old Dickie Jones.

However, when we think about children voicing children, the Charlie Brown Specials come to mind. Indeed, Charles M. Schulz always wanted his characters to be voiced by children for the sake of authenticity. It was so authentic, in fact, that some children had their lines cued to them, because they couldn’t read yet. Of course, each technique has its pros and cons; children voicing children does sound more authentic, but if the franchise runs for enough time, the kids will eventually need to be replaced with other kids. Such is the case of Charlie Brown and the “Peanuts” series. And in this case, there is nothing unethical about using children to voice child characters.

That’s not true for all cases. Some film-makers threw the ethics out the window for the sake of authenticity, and children were emotionally scarred because of it.

Can you imagine how 8-year-old Donnie Dunagan felt when Bambi’s mother was killed? That scene traumatized several generations of children, but Donnie had to be inside the sound booth… In The Lion King, the director told Jonathan Taylor Thomas to visualize his mother falling off the cliff. As a result, he ended up screaming ‘mom’. Don’t tell me this isn’t traumatizing to a young boy. Even more traumatizing would’ve been to play the character of Nina Tucker in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, but 9-year-old Sumire Morohoshi was cast for the fateful role. Worse yet: the character of Setsuko from the movie Grave of the Fireflies was played by 5-year-old Ayano Shiraishi.

You would think no sane casting director would ever have the nerve to cast children for those roles, but in all these cases, that door was slammed open. An argument can be made that those decisions were gross ethical breaches that scarred the children for life. All in the name of Art, of course.

No one would argue that hiring children to voice Ponyo and Sosuke was the right thing to do, but the movie Ponyo is pretty harmless (there are two heartbreaking moments in it). Grave of the Fireflies on the other hand is traumatic from beginning to end.

Live-action movies have no shortage of traumatized young actors. Audiences were impressed when Vada Sultenfuss cried at Thomas J.’s funeral but, in order to get that gut-wrenching performance, 10-year-old Anna Chlumsky was told by her mother “picture me in that casket”. I can’t imagine that not scarring a child.

Even though Thomas J. died, we all know that Macaulay Culkin isn’t dead. His face went through a make-up process to make it look like he had been fatally stung by bees. That’s movie magic for you! When (in all versions of Lord Of The Flies) we see Roger throwing a boulder at Piggy, we know that scene has been rehearsed many times and, with clever camera tricks, we are led to believe that Roger murdered Piggy, but we know that’s not true. All the blood we see in films is nothing but corn syrup, and all the violence is rehearsed. Many effects of ‘violence’ are dealt with in post-production. After the director says ‘cut,' the actors smile, go out to lunch and back to their normal lives.

Physical violence is easy to fake and easy to make believable. Emotional violence is not. If an actor is put in the mental space of a character going through emotional abuse, they’re going to be mentally affected, whether they want to or not. I don’t know any reader who read through Blood On The Tracks and didn’t come out of it mentally scarred in some way… And I am talking about a manga that is targeted to adults. If a live-action adaptation could be approved for Blood On The Tracks, hiring a 13-year-old boy to inhabit the head space of Seiichi would be nothing short of an ethical disaster. For any filmmaker, representing Seiichi’s terror and confusion on-screen would require guiding a child actor through scenes that involve sustained emotional abuse. The immersive nature of acting means they would still experience feelings of fear, anxiety, or shame that could leave an imprint, regardless of the director’s attempts to protect them. It would be nearly impossible to portray the character of Seiichi Osabe without asking the child actor to embody the resulting trauma, no matter how vicariously. And Seiichi is not the only child being abused in that manga, either, so two more children (Fukiishi, and Seiko herself, if the entire manga was to be adapted) would need to be sacrificed for this to happen.

Adapting this manga in anime form, would present the same problems as a live-action adaptation. In all certainty, the casting director would simply choose a female actress to play 13-year-old Seiichi. A safe, ethical choice, of course, but a self-defeating one. Either it’s unethical, or it’s a ‘cheat’. Either option doesn’t do Blood On The Tracks any favors as a work of art. The only way to minimize the damage would be to have a psychiatrist on set (or on the booth), at all times. Or a team of them — one for each actor. 

Maybe child labor laws in Japan wouldn’t allow children to act anyway… Maybe that’s why no adaptation of Aku no Hana has child actors…

After watching a short film entitled The Cord (which has many parallels with this manga), I began thinking that a mute version of Blood On The Tracks could actually work, given Oshimi’s boundless gift to tell entire stories through body language and facial features alone. Not sure whether a mute animated adaptation of Blood On The Tracks would garner any popularity with viewers, though… But, then again, I have my doubts that Blood On The Tracks is a popular enough manga to be considered for an adaptation anyway… We know that Aku no Hana is a bestseller because it’s already had three adaptations. As much as I respect Blood On The Tracks as a work of art, I don’t know if it’s selling enough copies to even pay for Oshimi’s monthly rice bills… I don’t imagine this manga flies off the shelves like hotcakes. Let’s face it: stories about child abuse are difficult to market and sell.

For all these reasons, adapting Blood On The Tracks is likely a futile attempt. Adapting it faithfully would represent an ethical violation by subjecting real children to unimaginable emotional trauma for the sake of realism, and no story should demand that price. Perhaps it’s best to leave this tale within the pages of a manga, where its horror and poignancy can be experienced without any sort of compromise.