Gintama live-action movie adaptation
Throughout history, anime films and live-action adaptations, is kind of like adding water to oil, they just don’t mix very well, from a theoretical standpoint. They just won’t mix together no matter how hard you mix the two ingredients. However
sometimes, just sometimes, we witness a brief moment of gods-work. When something that should never have happened, becomes a fantastic reality. In conventional English we call such occurrences as miracles. And when a higher being happens to mix thee water and oil that is the live-action-anime genre, we get the miraculously good mixture that we fail to believe exists on this planet, and that is the Gintama live-action film.
The live-action adaptation genre is infamous for being poor representations of a franchise, because of reasons like being unfaithful to the original story, or poor acting, generally a bad adaptation of what was once a better form of entertainment. Popular examples being deathnote, dragon BallZ, and other stuff that I will not discuss further into. So despite my prejudices, expectations, and experience with the genre, I can assure you that Gintama is one of the very few that managed to break away and become a good live-action movie adaptation.
Before I finished watching it, I actually watched for arguments sake, expecting it to be like another poor adaptation, and talk about how inferior it is compared to the original material, but I was wrong. For all of you who don’t know what gintama is, it is a tremenduously popular series that was hosting since 2006 to 2018. If you go to My anime list, and look at the top rated anime series, then you would see this just dominate that list. But there is a good reason for that, it not just because of the weebs, and the memes, but just because it really is a good show, filled with comedy and action packed story arcs, while making references to other popular franchises in a funny sarcastic way. In addition to their goofy, and likable characters, it is not a wonder that it is popular in the past and present.
In the beginning of the movie, they adapted a part of the first episode of the series, followed by a 3DCG-chibi commentary of the main characters, explaining that there is not enough time to explain the show for those who are not familiar with the franchise, then arguing that people who went through the trouble of watching the movie are most likely those who are already familiar with the said franchise. Then they followed with the rhinoceros beetle arc, to introduce the side-characters who will appear throughout the movie, and then they blend that, into the main story that is the benizakura arc where the main movie begins. I think it was a genius idea to just cut the story and break the fourth wall all the while being satirical, informative and comedic just so that they could create a decent movie.
And in concern to the writers and the directors of this movie, they managed to do this one thing that many live actions fail in, and that is they did not change the story. I get it that many movies change the story in order to acquire a larger audience, time and budget constraints, and cultural limitations. But in this movie they changed almost zero portions of the original story, other than adding some original jokes, and a few changes to the original dialogue, just to spice it up a bit. The acting in this movie too was I thought not that bad, in fact I thought that it was pretty good. One thing that the gintama series is known for is its ridiculous facial expressions and movement characters make. And despite the limitations in the media, the actors managed to pull of the looks pretty well, they nailed the characters down, the kind of jokes their character makes, everything was really put well together in my opinion. And the best part of it all, it was actually funny. I genuinely was just laughing in my seat while I was watching the movie, because it really was funny.
All in all, I really think that this movie is a really good movie, if they would make a sequel of this movie, then I probably will watch as long as it has the same cast, directors and writers from this film, the CG was great, the acting was great, my point is it is a great movie. If you haven’t watched it and if you are wondering if it is worth your time, then I recommend that you watch it right now, unless you have more important things to do or if you are totally unfamiliar with the genre then I advise you stay away from it as you might find it not to your tastes. It is a great movie.








