Top 10 Manga That Deserve an Anime Adaptation
Every year the adaptation machine gets faster, and every year the same masterpieces get skipped. These ten are ranked on how badly they deserve a serious anime and how much a good one would matter.
The rankings
- Vagabond. Takehiko Inoue’s Musashi epic is the most beautiful manga ever drawn and has never been animated. It would need a studio willing to treat brushstrokes as sacred.
- Berserk, done properly. Three adaptations and none finished the Golden Age at full quality, let alone the arcs after it.
- Oyasumi Punpun. Inio Asano’s coming of age nightmare, with a protagonist drawn as a bird. Unfilmable, which is exactly why someone should try.
- 20th Century Boys. Naoki Urasawa’s conspiracy epic got live action films but never the long anime it needs.
- Real. Inoue’s wheelchair basketball story is his most human work and completely untouched.
- Blame! One film exists. The manga’s silent, endless megastructure deserves a series.
- Homunculus. Hideo Yamamoto’s psychological horror about a man who drills a hole in his skull and starts seeing people’s true shapes. Anime has been scared of it for twenty years.
- Kingdom, at full quality. The anime exists but has never matched the manga’s scale.
- Sun Ken Rock. Boichi’s gangster comedy would be an instant hit.
- Historie. Hitoshi Iwaaki’s ancient Greek epic is slow, brilliant and unadapted.
Why they get skipped
Seinen sells fewer figures than shonen, and the art in most of these is too detailed to animate cheaply. The industry has the money now. It needs the nerve.
My take: Vagabond is the one. If a studio ever announces it with the right budget, it becomes the most anticipated anime in history overnight.
