Anime Adaptations of Light Novels and Games

In this finale of the Unlimited Blade Works series, I renew hope in you readers, for this light novel was adapted into an anime by the reputed studio, Ufotable. You will not be disappointed. The anime not only utilised its potential to accommodate the philosophy behind Unlimited Blade Works' fiery fights, but it enhanced them as well. Unlimited Blade Works' core message is conquering oneself, evidently driven home by the dialogue between Emiya Shirou and Archer(who is Emiya Shirou from a different timeline). Archer despises who he became and aimed to prevent Emiya from becoming him by eliminating him. It was upto Emiya to prove Archer wrong. This was not done justice in the movie.  Who said animation can only make fights better? The dynamic facial expressions during character dialogue, the perfect voice-acting just took the series to another level, to the point where the movie adaptation was nudged out to irrelevance.It made the haphazard cuts in story frames of the movie extre...

In my previous articles, we looked at how the Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works route was unjustly adapted into a movie. Here, we talk about the main cinematic aspect which the Fate series revolves upon - intertexuality. As mentioned earlier, the Servants in Fate are all characters of mythologies from all around the world, in a present-day setting. It is an anachronism . In fact, so are their weapons. Let's take a look. 1.Cú Chulainn and Gae Bolg In Unlimited Blade Works this is a weapon used by the Servant of class Lancer,  Cú Chulainn . It is based on a weapon, Gae Bulg of Irish mythology. In both the myth and the light novel, it is a weapon which always lands a mortal wound on its victim, however the movie, in its endeavour of enhancing visual beauty discussed in the last blog, appropriated this weapon to make it look a bit more flashy. The plot of Lancer in the series matches that of his mythological one (in an appropriated way) - a battle maniac who performs noble deeds at...

This will be a follow-up to my previous post where we summarised the difference between the differences between the Fate Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works light novel and the movie. The movie tries to put the light novel into a 1 hour 45 minute nutshell. As one could expect, this wouldn't end up satisfactory. The movie glides through the explanation of the theme (which is the Holy Grail War) too briefly to be understood. We also see the movie shabbily jumping to scenes, making the viewer have to guess the context for themselves. Is it possible for an over-shortened adaptation to cover both the message and the complete entertainment of its source? It depends on what percentage of the source material contributes to these two aspects. In the case of the Fate Stay Night UBW light novel, there are very few scenes which are not relevant to the development of the story. In fact, even those few scenes would later be seen to contribute to the prologue of the novel wherein the two main charac...

Fate/Stay Night is a popular visual novel(or game) released in 2004. It consisted of three routes which all follow a similar line of plot: there are magicians called Masters who control beings called Servants and fight each other to obtain the Holy Grail, which can grant any wish.  The second route of the visual novel, titled Unlimited Blade Works, was adapted into a movie in 2010.  The important thing to note when comparing the movie and the light novel is that the movie was made with the assumption that the viewer has some knowledge of the plot. The consequences of such a constraint on a source material can be heavy. The Unlimited Blade Works visual  in particular, had a deep philosophical message about how Gilgamesh, a warrior who could use all Noble Phantasms(powerful,ancient weapons) would never be able to defeat Emiya Shirou, a master of one specific weapon. Other fights in the visual novel too possess such philosophical backgrounds. The movie however, strips the pl...