+
I. The Art of Adaptation
+
To understand where an adaptation goes wrong, we must first understand what adaptation actually is.
+
Every medium tells stories within its own constraints. Manga relies on stillness, negative space and reader-controlled pacing. Animation relies on motion, sound, and set pacing. The way a story reveals emotion, builds tension, or allows a moment to express itself is shaped by the medium in which it was born.
+
Adapting a work is not a matter of simply copying content from one format to another. It is an attempt to translate an experience across fundamentally different mediums.
+
That translation is inherently imperfect. Everything behaves differently. Timing changes, Visual representation shifts. A single manga panel that lands like thunder and makes you pause for minutes may last only seconds in animation. An expression meant to be read in stillness must now be expressed in motion, voice, and framing.
+
This is why adaptation is one of the most demanding creative acts. It requires both reverence and ruthlessness: preserving what defines the work while discarding what cannot survive the transition, and reinventing what must.
+
Unlike original creations, adaptations are never judged on their own terms. They are measured against memory, a version of the story the audience already is familiar with. Even a technically competent adaptation can feel wrong if it fails to match this internalised rhythm readers have already formed.
+
But adaptations rarely fail in a single, dramatic moment. They fracture, through small compromises scattered across the process.
+
In order to understand how great source material becomes poor anime, those fractures must be traced back to where they begin.
+
II. The Many Fault Lines of Adaptation Failure
+
Industry analysis and reporting repeatedly show that anime adaptations fail in three interconnected domains:
+
+ - Planning
+ - Creative Leadership & Series Composition
+ - Production Execution & Technical Delivery
+
+
These domains map to different kinds of “Bad adaptations” audiences often experience mainly:
+
+ - Unfaithful (story altered or condensed)
+ - Flat (emotion or pacing lost)
+ - Technically bad (poor animation, jarring CGI, inconsistent art)
+
+
If we follow these fault lines, we can understand the reasoning behind these three fates of an anime adaptation.
+
1. Planning : When the Failure Begins Before Anything Is Animated
+
Long before a single line of animation is drawn, the fate of an adaptation is decided by the production committee.
+
The committee decides things like :
+
+ - Budget
+ - Episode count
+ - Schedule
+ - Studio selection
+ - Commercial goals
+
+
Basically laying down a commercial backbone dictating what is in store for the adaptation.
+
If the source material is long but the anime only gets 12 episodes, entire arcs must be compressed. If the budget is tight, amination sequences must be shortened, staff reduced.
+
This is not hypothetical, it’s the norm.
+
The Promised Neverland Season 2 illustrates this clearly. The anime attempted to resolve a long-form narrative within a drastically shortened lifespan. The result was missing content and the erosion of tension and thematic buildup that defined the manga’s identity.
+
Similarly, Blue Exorcist (2011) and Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) diverged from their manga because the adaptations were greenlit without accurate foresight into the source’s publication timeline. Once the anime caught up, deviation became the only option to continue forward.
+
These are failures of structure and planning decisions, no amount of talent downstream can preserve narrative integrity in these cases.
+
To the audience, this manifests as stories that feel rushed, incomplete, or emotionally hollow.
+
2. Creative Leadership & Series Composition: When directive vision meets the Source
+
Once the constraints are set, the adaptation passes into the hands of directors, scriptwriters, and series composers. This is the point where intent and interpretation collide.
+
A manga’s internal rhythm, its emotional pacing, depth, and narrative pacing all must be reshaped for animation. Done well, it becomes a new expression of the same spirit. Done poorly, it becomes a different story entirely.
+
When this interpretive layer fails, the adaptation may remain coherent on paper but loses its emotional direction.
+
Tokyo Ghoul √A is a defining example. By diverging from Sui Ishida’s manga, the anime removed the psychological causality that justified Kaneki’s transformation by changing events. Key motivations were altered or erased, leaving a story that still moved forward along the same lines but no longer knew why.
+
Claymore and Soul Eater suffered a similar fate through anime-original endings. In both cases, the narrative reached a conclusion, but the emotional and thematic buildup that gave the manga’s endings their charm was replaced with abrupt resolution.
+
Even Record of Ragnarok, which remained largely faithful in plot, demonstrates how interpretation can fail without altering the story. Solely because of its art direction which chose to rely heavily on still frames and stretched out pacing, the anime stripped momentum from battles that were explosive in manga format. The events were intact; the “experience” was not.
+
These adaptations fail because they failed to interpret what the story is doing. Fidelity is not matching plot points. It is preserving emotional logic, narrative and thematic intent.
+
When that spine breaks, the result is an anime that looks correct but feels wrong, a familiar story that no longer carries the same experience.
+
3. Production Execution & Technical
Delivery : Where Art Meets Labor
+
Animation is a grueling, labor-intensive, and often underfunded task. Schedules are punishing. Even the most faithful script cannot survive a collapsing production pipeline.
+
But why and what leads to a collapsing production line ..?
+
Sometimes, the fault once again lies in the hands of the production committee.
+
Grueling schedules and lack of accurate foresight leads to production houses rushing to meet deadlines and often releasing an anime in unfinished state.
+
Sometimes internal collapses occur in production houses which leads to delayed and poor quality product even leading to sudden studio changes in the middle of an anime run.
+
Sometimes Production houses take on projects that they cannot undertake leading to a mismatched product.
+
Berserk (2016-17) is often cited because of its technical failure due to heavy reliance on poorly integrated CGI that shattered immersion. The glaring issue was execution without sufficient resources or refinement.
+
Ex-Arm (2021) represents the far end of this spectrum: mismatched CGI, off-model characters, and visible compositing failures. Public comments from staff pointed to inexperience and cost-cutting as primary causes, not a lack of effort.
+
In these cases, the story remained technically faithful, but the medium itself failed to carry it.
+
Technical failures destroy trust. Once visual coherence breaks down, the audience can no longer emotionally engage with the narrative. The adaptation fails because it cannot convincingly exist for the audience to enjoy.
+
It's also one of the most visible cases of a failed adaptation where anyone can understand that this was wrongly executed. It's not only a heartbreaking failure for the fans but also a great injustice to the source material.
+
It's a complete undoing of an impactful story.
+
III. Why Failed Adaptations Are Systemic: The Failure without Villains.
+
By the time an adaptation collapses on screen, all of the fractures described in Part II are already visible: rushed pacing, altered intent, technical shortcomings. These failures are real, and their effects are undeniable.
+
What is often misunderstood, however, is intent.
+
In the vast majority of failures, no single party sets out to sabotage a story. Studios do not wake up intending to disrespect a source. Directors do not aim to hollow out the story's experience. Animators do not choose bad execution for its own sake.
+
Most failed adaptations are not acts of negligence. They are products behaving exactly as the system that created them allows.
+
Anime adaptation failure is the result by design within its industry.
+
The anime industry did not evolve as an auteur-driven creative space. It evolved as a mass-production, risk-managed media pipeline, designed to convert popular intellectual property into commercially viable products under tight constraints.
+
Every adaptation begins with a business incentive in mind.
+
Production committees invest in anime because the source material has already proven its market value by manga sales, brand recognition, merchandise potential, and audience reach.
+
Once that threshold is met, the objective shifts in order to extract value while minimizing financial risk.
+
Within this framework, excellence is not the primary goal of anyone Predictability is.
+
This is why so many adaptations are approved with conservative episode counts, compressed schedules and limited or inflexible budgets
+
From a business perspective, a “good enough” adaptation that maintains brand visibility or boosts source material sales is often preferable to a risky, resource-heavy production chasing artistic excellence.
+
Unlike films or creator-led television, anime adaptations operate under fragmented authority.
+
No single entity owns the work’s creative soul.
+
Publishers prioritize sales. Broadcasters prioritize scheduling. Merchandisers prioritize market timing. Studios prioritize survival and staff availability.
+
Each stakeholder optimizes for a different metric of success. As a result, creative intent must pass through layers of negotiation, compromise, and approval.
+
And every adjustment may be individually reasonable. Collectively, they tend to dilute vision.
+
A director may want more time. A writer may want more episodes. A studio may want to delay for quality control.
+
But none of them control the calendar or the capital.
+
But this creates a question, Why does the system Keeps Repeating Itself..?
+
One of the most damaging realities of anime production is visibility of a metric i.e. What can be measured like Disc sales, streaming numbers, merchandise revenue etc.
+
What cannot be easily measured like animator exhaustion, creative fatigue, long-term quality erosion and loss of staff morale etc.
+
When a visibly flawed adaptation performs “good enough,” the system interprets this as validation. The flaws are not seen as warnings, but as acceptable trade-offs.
+
This creates a feedback loop, partial success justifies tighter schedules, tighter schedules increase production strain, strain produces more compromised adaptations.
+
Over time, these conditions have normalized.
What appears to audiences as avoidable becomes, within the system, a standard operating procedure.
+
IV. When the System Produces Excellence: Why Great Adaptations Matter
+
History shows that from time to time, anime adaptations arrive that disrupt the industry heavily.
+
They become reference points, escaping industry constraints demonstrating how those constraints can be negotiated without destroying the work’s core.
+
Works such as Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Attack on Titan, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, and Mob Psycho 100 did not emerge from a different industry. They emerged from the same fragmented, risk-prone structure described earlier.
+
The conditions that enabled their success were rare alignments: clear planning, stable production, and creative leadership granted enough authority to preserve what the story was fundamentally about.
+
These adaptations matter because they change the terms of comparison. Once audiences experience an adaptation that commits to the craft, the absence of those qualities elsewhere becomes harder to ignore. What was once tolerated becomes visible as compromise.
+
This is the influence of good adaptations. They raise the baseline against which future works are judged by altering expectations of the masses. The system may continue to reward speed over care and predictability over risk, but audiences, creators, and critics do not forget what excellence looks like once they have seen it.
+
Importantly, this does not contradict the reality that failed adaptations remain common. The existence of great adaptations does not mean the pipeline has been corrected. It just means that within a flawed structure, exceptional outcomes are still possible with enough persistence.
+
These works are cited by fans, creators and producers when attempting to negotiate.
+
In this way, great adaptations function as an overall boon to the industry. They expose what is lost when compromise goes too far, and what is possible when it does not.
+
This is why supporting well-made adaptations matters, because it preserves standards. In an ecosystem where “good enough” is often sufficient, remembering what “good” actually looks like is itself a very important thing.
+
Excellence in anime adaptation is rare by design. But once it appears, it leaves a trace that is visibly being experienced with the rapid expansion of the industry and higher amounts of faithful adaptations coming out every year.
+
+
+ 
+ 