10 Most Mediocre Manga Made Better By Amazing Anime Adaptations
In most cases, any given anime is more likely to be worse than the source material by a fair margin. Whether it’s because an anime adaptation fails to meet quality standards for animation, or ruins the pacing of the jokes or tears the plot to shreds, genuinely good adaptations are a rare breed. In a similar vein, anime adaptations that actually improve upon the original source and make the anime the better way to experience the story are even more so.
Many things need to come together perfectly for an anime to stand out against an original work. The visuals and writing being strong are obvious, but less glaring pieces of the puzzle are just as important. The music needs to land, as does the voice acting, and the pacing of scenes and jokes, all of which aren’t a problem for manga panels. Many action series need to make the fight choreography work in motion, rather than just utilize impact frames. It takes a lot of moving parts for an anime to shine, but when it all comes together, the effect can be greater than the sum of its parts.
Lucky Star Managed To Bottle Lightning
Lucky Star’s 2007 anime adaptation is a perfect example of lightning in a bottle. It seems unlikely, looking at the series now, that it would have garnered the popularity and acclaim that it did in 2007 if it was released in the current anime landscape. The four-panel comic-based manga was adapted by Kyoto Animation, and was filled with timely references and plenty of inside jokes for the anime community of the time.
In addition to timing the release well, the entire adaptation was of exceptionally high quality. The animation itself was stellar, despite the series being a slice-of-life series focused on jokes. Kyoto Animation also worked to make the different scenes flow together well, despite their original four-panel nature, which left things short and quippy in the manga, rather than cohesive. The background music featured throughout the anime was also perfectly designed to fit the anime, wrapping the entire package up in a perfect bow.
Nichijou Went Even Further Beyond With Absurdist Humor
Another big hit from Kyoto Animation, Nichijou excelled as an anime mostly for one simple reason – commitment to the bit. The Nichijou manga is full of absurdist humor, often exaggerating mundane life in a way that makes it hilarious, laugh-out-loud and funny. The manga uses the absurdist humor to great effectiveness on the page, with slightly longer comics than a traditional four-panel strip, even including cut away gags and shorter comic strips.
The anime adaptation could have simply translated what was on the page to the screen, and it would have been funny. However, Kyoto Animation apparently doesn’t do anything in half measures, because when they animated Nichijou, they went all in. The animation quality is off the charts, including some of the most indulgent sakuga seen in anime, let alone in what is supposed to be a slice-of-life gag series. The super-high-quality animation combined with the absurd antics on screen together elevated the series in a way that could only have happened in animation.
Laid-Back Camp Went From Cozy Manga To All-Out Vibe
The Laid-Back Camp manga succeeds at what it set out to do; it walks readers through many aspects of camping, including activities, gear and even planning. Reading the manga is a very cozy experience, that stands apart from much of its competition just by being written well and the characters being wholly endearing. The anime takes the entire thing a step forward by turning the cozy reading experience up several notches in a way that creates an overwhelming vibe of coziness from the screen.
Laid-Back Camp’s visuals are responsible for part of it, mostly consisting of soft designs and colors, but it’s the other aspects of the production that really raise the anime above. The music and soundscape consistently create a calming atmosphere when the show is on, which is only added to by many of the characters’ voice acting with a pleasant amount of energy in many of the calmer scenes. From there, the anime goes even further, often including long scenes of nothing but calming landscape shots with pleasant music to just relax to – something a manga simply can’t accomplish on its own.
Gintama Took Every Advantage Of Being Animated It Could
The hallmark of any great adaptation to a new medium is that it takes full advantage of whatever medium it is transferred to. Gintama took every advantage it could in the move from manga page to television screen, between adding great voice acting and music, rewriting jokes for the new medium and even taking advantage of timely events to write entirely new scenes for the anime. The series, famous for its swapping between comedy and drama arcs, took full advantage there, too, with stunningly animated scenes and music for the drama parts as well.
The approach taken by the studios involved led to much of the Gintama anime being filler in some ways, as it was mostly anime original content, but with Gintama, that never felt like the wrong approach. The series’ comedy and parody roots allowed the new, anime-specific content to flourish while it was interspersed with the important manga arcs that made the series’ more dramatic portions shine. This is also one of many series that lived and died by its fantastic voice cast, including Tomokazu Sugita as leading man Gintoki Sakata.
Hunter x Hunter (2011) Rose Above With Production Alone
Hunter x Hunter and its author Yoshihiro Togashi are well-known for good reason. Togashi has created some of the best works in the shōnen genre to date between Hunter x Hunter and Yu Yu Hakusho. However, while Togashi is an amazing writer, storyteller, and creator, he is often held back by his art and, more recently, his body. He has taken long hiatuses for health reasons, especially during Hunter x Hunter’s run, and the chapters show it with art that is absolutely overrun with long dialogue bubbles that dominate the pages.
In contrast, the 2011 adaptation of Hunter x Hunter produced by Studio Madhouse solved most of the common complaints surrounding the series by simply being a stellar, high-quality production. The art throughout the 148 episodes was great, the music and voice cast were all incredibly strong, and Togashi’s writing was given a fantastic stage on which to shine. Madhouse also never held back on the animation itself, making any action or otherwise exciting scenes pop in ways that a manga panel struggle to. The anime was simply given the care and attention it needed to shine its best.
Mob Psycho 100 Took One’s Style And Made It Explosive
Mob Psycho 100 was always a well-written manga series, just like author One’s other series, One-Punch Man. However, it fell into the same pitfalls as well, mostly related to One’s web-comic art, which is well below what a reader would expect from a published work. One-Punch Man found massive success as a web-comic, and was eventually picked up by Yusuke Murata to be remade with the art that fans are now familiar with due to the anime adaptation.
In Mob Psycho 100’s case, Studio Bones decided to take One’s distinct web-comic style and animate it so well that no one could complain about the art being ‘poor’. Mob’s animation is always in constant motion and so lively that it’s difficult to imagine what the series would be like if it were handled in a more ‘traditional’ style instead of the sketch-like comic style that Bones used. Taking it one step forward, Mob is single-handedly responsible for some of the best animation seen in the medium, which elevated the original work considerably to the level of One’s already stellar writing.
Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War Is a Straight Upgrade
Despite the contant arguing over author Aka Akasaka’s storytelling ability, it is hard to argue over his success with Kaguya-Sama: Love is War. It became one of the most recommendable romantic comedy anime during its first season, and has only gone upward from there, even landing at the top of the anime charts for some time. The anime is a fantastic adaptation of the manga that is elevated thanks in part to the voice cast being simply remarkable at their roles, and in part to the production adapting things for the screen impossibly well.
The Kaguya-Sama manga is a great series to begin with. While Akasaka’s art isn’t as polished as many artists, it is serviceable enough to tell the story he wanted to, and his manga paneling and joke timing more than make up for the below-average art. The anime adaptation took Akasaka’s art style and cleaned it up to make the anime designs look eye-catching, which was a good upgrade to make, but where they really excelled was adapting it. Scenes were retooled to make the timings of punchlines work better on screen, and there were tons of short visual gags added to keep the story fresh and engaging, making a series that was simply better than the sum of its parts – and that’s before mentioning any of the music.
Bocchi The Rock!’s Production Team Went Above and Beyond
While Bocchi the Rock! is enjoying immense popularity now, it is almost entirely thanks to the insanely good anime adaptation it received in 2022. The original manga is an above average four-panel comic, with solid art and paneling, good jokes, and an entertaining cast of characters. On the other hand, the manga’s biggest downside was that it didn’t really stand out in any way. The art is good, but standard-looking, and funny four-panel comics are easy enough to find that it simply didn’t make a meaningful splash.
Things changed when the production team, headed by character designer and chief animation director Kerorira, got hold of the project. The anime adaptation took what was in the manga and dialed everything up, utilizing absurd humor, cutaway gags, and entirely different animation styles to convey emotion and humor. It turned an average manga into something truly special and memorable.
Demon Slayer And UFOtable Is A Match Made In Heaven
The Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba manga was a popular series during its run in Weekly Shōnen Jump. Like many contemporary manga in the genre, it cuts out a lot of the fat and let the plot drive the entire series, moving quickly through exciting story beats to keep readers hooked. However, while the manga was good, it didn’t seem to be anything special; the art was on the better side of mediocre, as was the writing and plot. Demon Slayer was just good, not great.
When Studio UFOtable took over the anime adaptation, they did exactly what they had become known for after animating the Fate series. They took Demon Slayer’s intense, action-first story and made it simply unforgettable with ludicrously good animation, fight choreography, and just general quality. UFOtable’s strength in crafting breathtaking action animation ended up working perfectly with Demon Slayer’s condensed, fast-moving plot. Notably for the series, everything came noticeably together in season 1, episode 19, “Hinokami,” which had the enitre anime community blowing up social media because of the way the story, action and music came together for one of the most memorable anime moments in recent memory.
K-On! Was Reworked Entirely, For The Better
When fans talk about anime that are better than their manga, K-On! is often the first series mentioned. Based on a fairly simple four-panel comic manga, the anime that Kyoto Animation ended up producing is almost unrecognizable when compared to the source material. Yes, the anime features the same characters and several of the same plot lines and jokes, but the actual through-line of the anime and the emotional punches it has ready for viewers seem completely alien to the source manga.
The anime managed to stitch together disjointed chapters of the manga in ways that made coherent episodes, in addition to showing off the fantastic character animation that Kyoto Animation is now known for. Beyond that, the music, both the songs performed by the in-show band and the background music, is amazing from start to finish, which adds a massively missing element from the manga; sound. K-On! is also the first full project that director Naoko Yamada handled, and it shows, with her distinct style seen all over the project.
