What Fantasy Stories would Work as a Live Action or Animated Adaptation?

[Hawki]

Legend of Zelda. I kinda sorta rememeber the animated adaptations from the 1990's(1980's) and yeah, I'm not holding my breath for this. I'm not even sure how they'd make it actually work.

Said it above, I'll say it here - if you're making a LoZ movie, DON'T adapt it from the games. Reason being is that the structure of the games isn't condusive towards a traditional three act structure. You might be able to get it to work as a cartoon series, but I'm kind of left asking what the point would be. Figure if there's going to be a LoZ movie, make it its own thing that can exist in the timeline(s) - allows it to keep in canon (making fans happy), which also allows it to have a traditional movie structure (which makes filmgoers happy). Everyone wins.

In theory.

 

[Saint of M]

Legend of Zelda. I kinda sorta rememeber the animated adaptations from the 1990's(1980's) and yeah, I'm not holding my breath for this. I'm not even sure how they'd make it actually work.

Said it above, I'll say it here - if you're making a LoZ movie, DON'T adapt it from the games. Reason being is that the structure of the games isn't condusive towards a traditional three act structure. You might be able to get it to work as a cartoon series, but I'm kind of left asking what the point would be. Figure if there's going to be a LoZ movie, make it its own thing that can exist in the timeline(s) - allows it to keep in canon (making fans happy), which also allows it to have a traditional movie structure (which makes filmgoers happy). Everyone wins.

In theory.

Link gets told its dangerous to go out alone, take the magic sword. Go through a few caves and dungeons, fight pig gannon, get the princess or start off with the princess leading a war against Gannon adn gets both defeated and captured. Link, say the son of one of her best warriors, hears that his father has been killed and the princess has been captured. THe old man he was studying under gives him the sword and he goes out to and ends up rescuring the girl and finding the triforce. All three take a part of it, with Gannon being defeated. All three then are linked and all sequals can take whatever style they want.

That or they could adapt it from one of the mangas.

 

[Agema]

I heard Wheel of Time is being made too.
That makes me happy.

I hope whoever does that basically rips it to shreds and remakes it.

The Wheel of Time is just about the worst example of flabby, overwritten (under-edited?) fantasy epics imaginable. Although I fear Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive is trying to outdo it. Book after book after book rolls on with basically nothing happening. I think I read the first and second okay, got steadily more bored 3-5, and only read 6 because I'd run out of anything else to read and my flatmate had it. Think of everything the Lord of the Rings got done in 3 books and ~300 pages each, and weep at the idea WoT is 13 or so books, each at around twice the length. It's not particularly original, and the characters mostly appear to be a set of ever-recycled traits that rapidly collapse into repetitive cliche. One book I think I recall opens with this huge amount of time portaying the view from a tower. Or some scene where some people are meeting in a field, and Jordan seems to think what matters is a minute description of what everyone looks like and the way the wind ruffles the grass, as if the task is describing a photograph rather than telling a story. Who. The. Fuck. Cares. Nor is it fun trying to oversee an increasingly vast cast of under-drawn characters, who are increasingly granted their own POV sections - it's just tedious and overcomplicated.

In a way, I can see an attraction - Jordan clearly invested a lot of time realising his world and had a lot of passion to get that across to the reader. To people who love the idea of a heavily realised world where everything is explained in minute detail (because some fans have a desire to understand and categorise everything a fictional world rather than let their imagination fill the gaps) it's probably great. As a piece of storytelling, it's a bust - plain and simple. I can very much see why he handed over to Sanderson - Sanderson has many of the same instincts. He wants to tell you about the world he's designed, and the nifty magic systems he's designed and tried to make rational that the heroes have to puzzle out to saev the world... and somewhere along the way the story and its characters all dwindle into the background.

GoT was great as an adaptation for tossing a load of the tropes on the bonfire, and giving us a perhaps realistic-ish style approach to medieval power and interesting characters. WoT and most fantasy, however, are really just handing us much more simplistic narratives and characters which I suspect won't get much traction outside the fantasy community. They can just watch basic soaps, police dramas etc. for much the same character and plot value without engaging in the fantasy nonsense tht many of them actually like less than realism.

 

[Redneck Gamer]

Well, someone beat me to Animorphs, but everything previously said fits, it's a great series that could look really deep into the psychology of a fighters mindset, considering the group shows everything from someone who gets a little too into fighting, to the person who thinks they should forget it all, the leader's burden of responsibility and their slow numbing and breaking under the pressure, and that animal rights tree hugger girl getting to learn pacifism doesn't really work, and nature is freaking brutal.

For another series I suggest the Temeriare books. Make it an animated show, and they can use the whole series to explore racism, especially as something learned but never really "confronted" until it's right there, respecting other cultures, and that there are more fronts in a war than the good guys and bad guys. It would have to branch out from the books some, but who doesn't want to see Napoleon led France riding dragons against British dragonriders?

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

Spoiler

Adapting The Black Company would perfectly fit the conversation in this thread about studios finding less popular IPs to chase success. Glen Cook was writing "dark" and "realistic" fantasy in the 80s way before RR Martin's first GoT book. The Black Company is about a band of mercenaries caught up in the machinations of powers bigger than themselves. Fantasy from the soldiers' perspective. I highly recommend the books and seeing an adaption would be pretty neat.