Forgotten cartoons

There's a whole universe of cartoons that moved from the page to the silver screen losing more or less dignity in the process. The audience has only kept in the popular memory dark knights, wall-crawling neighbors and people with such colorful job uniforms as to command a carriage on Pride's day. But there's cinema with a soul of faith beyond capes and superpowers.

Forgotten cartoons: review of some comic adaptations to the big screen that get out of the superheroic  cliché.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the world

Edgar Wright (Shaun of the dead and Hoz fuzz) undertakes the hard task to adapt six volumes of epical twenty-year-old adventures classified in the esthetic of old school video game.

The result is funny and it has nasty rhythm (with some memorable shot changes), cutting out a lot on the way and taking a lot of liberty but, at the same time, being extremely faithful in accurate passages and providing with witty ideas such as giving visual shape to onomatopoeias to have fun by playing with them.

The choice of Michael Cera to bring the shameless main character to life throws off, Mary Elizabeth Winstead's look's goes down well.

And so thoughtful of him: for once in a work that uses fictitious groups' fictitious music, the songs that were created to that effect don't make you cringe. But quite the opposite.

Road to perdition

Sam Mendes's movie starred by Tom Hanks, Paul Newman and Jude Law was an adaptation of a comic of an identical title written by Max Allan Collins, who in turn drank, and a lot, in the legendary manga 子連れ狼.

The comic had two sequels and the movie, a deconstruction of noir genre, was nominated to six Oscars and it got cinematography's with some staging inspired in Edward Hooper's pictures. Both comic and movie are appealing, despite the fact that the film script, on undergoing several re-writings, moved slightly away from the original material.

Ninja turtles

90s icon par excellence, the turtles had their origin in a 1984 comic pretty much more boorish than the movie: the pages began as a Daredevil's greenish parody and, in the mid 90s, when the work passed at the hands of the Image publisher, the stories were degenerating into dark violent amusement: Leonardo lost his hand, Splinter turned into a bat, Raphael saw his face disfigured and later on turned into Shredder and Donatello was rebuilt in the shape of a cyborg.

The first real action movie adapted the pages by lowering the tone and by adding hateful surfing clichés (pizzas and cowabungas). About its movie sequel, just by knowing that the guest star was Vanilla Ice, not much should be said and, finally, the green got to have a third part, with time travels. Sleep-inducing.

The characters were recently recovered in the shape of computer generated animation tape next door, while on the paper the mess of Image's tried to be forgotten and formatted by the edition of new stories.

올드보이

박찬욱 surprised us in 2003 with a story of vengeance where a man, after being kidnapped for fifteen years in a room, and having as only company a television set, is freed to discover who is behind his confinement and the reason why.

The movie is a sticking out exercise of great visual personality and important ravings in whose feat the main character paved his way with the blow of a hammer, wolfed down living octopuses and quarreled a bad guy with the most twisted sickest plan in showy antagonists' history. It was part of the director's vengeance trilogy, composed of 복수는 나의 것, 

올드보이 and 친절한 금자씨.

What few knew is that the work was based on the premise of a manga of the same title created by Garon Tchusiya at the end of the 90s.

La gran aventura de Mortadelo y Filemón

Javier Fesser's universe drank a lot from Ibáñez's comic book, as short films and previous movies did reflect (Aquel ritmillo, El milagro de P. Tinto). So, Fesser was the rightest choice to move something as important as Mortadelo and Filemón's adventures to movie format.

The result had a brilliant prologue, fabulous staging, homages to heroes of national comics (Anacleto, a great gesture to 13 Rue del Percebe or the joke of a fascist Rompetechos) and a very irregular but funny development. Now, the unhinged reference to Indiana Jones and the last crusade made the audience's ass a one-thousand piece puzzle.

Miguel Bardem would take charge of a forgettable sequel with far much less knack. 

Men in black

Real beaten by critics who weren't able to get its touch of cartoonish humor, the tape, that told J and K's adventures, was based on some 90s pages of such a brief life (three issues), that introduced some men in black quarreling demons, aliens, mutants and all kind of paranormal monster. For the movie they just kept the alien part, and they replaced such politically correct details as the witnesses' murder with other more familiar options in the shape of memory flashers. It suffered a less funny and interesting sequel with the gallantry of having Johnny Knoxville in the cast and a Michael Jackson's cameo.

Blueberry

Jean-Michel Charlier and Moebius invented Blueberry on paper, a cowboy with Jean Paul Belmondo's features and some MacGyver's glimmers right in the West.

The Frenchman Jan Kounen (who had just directed the violent Dobermann) took charge of the adaptation on the big screen. The problem was that before the trip the man was getting peyote with a shaman, and thanks to that the movie turned into lysergic nonsense pretty much like a drag with Vincent Cassel, Juliette Lewis and Michael Madsen that only conserved from the original referent the name of the main character. A misfortune.

A history of violence

Cronenberg's thriller starred by Aragorn/Alatriste was applauded by a large part of the critics, who thanked that the director stepped away from his new flesh obsessions and people with meat complements where to plug the iPod in.

The story is based on a graphic novel of identical title, but the director himself claimed that he was unaware of that piece of information until they got to work in script re-writing during the pre-production.

The mask

It was 1994, Jim Carrey didn't look terribly tiring yet and the audience was surprised about that amazing technical demo of the special effect that was the The mask movie. Its origin was in a comic of similar premise (a mask which gives powers to the one who finds it) but with worse drool: the original cartoons made ultra-violence their leitmotiv and the mask's carrier tended to begin in series massacres and to murder all who bumped into him, lovely details that, curiously, were removed from the movie. Decency and the politically correct thing, as always, taking so many funny things from us.

Garfield

The move to celluloid of the chubby feline that reigned in the comic strips created by Jim Davis couldn't have been more disastrous: trashy mixture of Garfield generated by computer and live image. Bill Murray recognized in an interview that he accepted to make the cat's voice because when he was passed the script he confused the Joel Cohen who signed it with the Joel from the Coen brothers (learn, for God's sake, the Fargo's is spelled without an aitch). Now, he cheerfully participated in the sequel.

Years later, on the Zombieland tape, Bill Murray performed himself and, in a certain moment of the film, after being shot, he's asked if he's got something to regret. "Garfield", he replies. And with good reason.

We'll continue on Volume 2.