With this week's release of Transcendence, a movie where a scientist played by Johnny Depp escapes his death by digitizing himself, talk has started up again about concepts that first appeared in anime showing up in big Hollywood blockbusters. An article in The Daily Beast suggests that Hollywood has been stealing some of the best science fiction ideas from anime for sometime now. Several examples include Inception/Paprika, The Matrix/Ghost in the Shell, Pacific Rim/Evangelion, Her/Chobits and the main focus of the article, Transcendence/Serial Experiments Lain.
The realm of science fiction is a large, wide world influenced by dozens of creative forces over years of books, movies and other mediums. Part of what has made sci-fi such a great medium is the way that it builds on ideas that have come before. You don't have stuff like Blade Runner without Isaac Asimov and his Robot series of short stories. You can go even further back and say that you wouldn't have Asimov without stuff like Metropolis and the works of H.G. Wells. All that modern sci-fi film makers are doing is borrowing the ideas of good creators and trying to spin new tales that will eventually be iterated on.
It's pretty myopic to simply say that Hollywood is "stealing" ideas from anime. In the case of The Matrix, the Wachowskis used some basic ideas from GitS, combined them with a heavy dash of Neuromancer and spun it into one of the most well-known movies of our generation. With Inception, the main conceit of dream-jumping may have been similar to Paprika, but Christopher Nolan took his film in a different direction and ended up an interesting spin on the heist film. And let's not even get started on the comparisons between Pacific Rim and Evangelion. If anything, take it as Hollywood possibly recognizing the creativity and quality of certain stories by Japanese creators. It can only lead to interesting future projects on both sides of the Pacific.
from Japanator http://ift.tt/1hVt72z
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