I've been bracing for the latest Disney live-action adaptation of one of their animated classics, this time "Cruella," which creates an origin story for Cruella DeVil from "101 Dalmatians." However, there's been a burgeoning trend of live action adaptations of non-Disney animation lately, that's starting to get some attention.
The CW has ordered a pilot for a live-action "Powerpuff Girls" reboot for the 2021-2022 television season. The series has been described as a sequel, where the superpowered heroines Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercut are now disaffected twenty-somethings who are reuniting after a long separation. "Powerpuff" has already been rebooted twice, once by Cartoon Network, and once for a Japanese anime. Netflix has a more direct adaptation of "Avatar: The Last Airbender" in the works. This is expected to be completely different from the last live-action adaptation of the material, the feature film "The Last Airbender," which the show's fanbase famously disliked. "The Last Airbender" is primarily remembered as another black mark on the career of M. Night Shyamalan, and for a casting controversy where most of the Asian characters were played by white actors. The Netflix project will hopefully do better, but the original animated series' creators left the project last August, and the latest news is that at least one of the characters, Katara, is being aged up into an older teenager.
However, the property that's been getting the most attention over the past few months has been Netflix's "Fate: The Winx Saga," based off of the "Winx Club" Nickelodeon cartoon. The six-episode series premiered in January, and has been weathering derision from the fans because the "reimagining" apparently plays like a pretty generic teen drama, and the originally Asian and Latina main characters are now white. The critics were not kind, but the show has done well enough for Netflix that it's been renewed for a second season. Keep in mind that unlike the other shows, "Winx Club" only ended its production recently, and it's still being broadcast in several countries. "Winx" creator Iginio Straffi had also been gunning for a live action series for several years. So, "Fate: Winx Saga" was clearly designed to keep its franchise going, rather than to capitalize off of Millennials' warm, nostalgic, feelings toward an old cartoon they watched when they were kids.
But whatever the reason these shows were created, I find myself asking the same question. Why are all of these projects live-action? The Millennials are supposed to be the generation that really embraced animation, that stayed up late to watch violent Japanese anime, and fueled the rise of darker American adult 'toons like "Archer" and "Rick and Morty." Why shouldn't a meaner and edgier "Winx Club" and "Powerpuff Girls" be produced as animated shows? I get that there are still those viewers who won't watch anything animated, or assume all cartoons are aimed at kids, but doesn't it completely undercut the joke in "Powerpuff," if the girls are too far removed from the owl-eyed cartoon versions? Animation, for all the cultural baggage it seems to have, is capable of doing things that live action can't. Things that look ridiculous in three dimensions are perfectly okay when you're dealing with two. And a lot of the appeal of "Winx," "Powerpuff," and "Airbender," disappear when they're converted into fleshy real world forms. I don't understand why so many executives still can't get this through their thick skulls.
The only live action adaptation of an animated property that I've ever thought was a good idea, was the 1997 "George of the Jungle," and that was because they managed to make a film that behaved remarkably like a cartoon. A couple of others like "Josie and the Pussycats" and the "Dora" movie made up entirely new stories and characters out of whole cloth that had little to do with the cartoons at all. Clearly, the runaway success of the Disney live-action adaptations has had a lot of influence on the decisionmaking here, but the best of those films are mildly entertaining, inoffensive rehashes of much better animated originals. The worst are reviled by everyone, but most of all by the original fans.
At this point, the only reboot of an animated property I am looking forward to is Kevin Smith's "Masters of the Universe" anime - and I don't even like He-man!
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