What, specifically, looks so bad about the new Fist of the North Star TV series?
I had been quietly excited about the upcoming TV series revival of one of my all-time favorites, the post-apocalyptic kung-fu melodrama Fist of the North Star (Hokuto no Ken). It’s certainly been long enough— the original Toei TV series is over 40 years old!— and with a high-end production the enduring, beloved and bloody tale of Kenshiro and his brothers could easily become a major success all over again.
Publisher Coamix has been playing very coy with details about their remake, showing only some impressive key art and refusing to reveal the name of the studio or a single member of the creative staff. A frustrating “countdown to another countdown” ultimately led to what was supposed to be a big reveal at Anime Expo.
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So I and every other Kenshiro fanboy shared a deep, collective disappointment at the big Anime Expo reveal of a teaser trailer. We still don’t know who’s making it, but the new Fist of the North Star TV show will be mostly CG animated. And they don’t seem to have done a great job of it; Youtube response to the lukewarm trailer is almost entirely negative.
I want to point out that I’m not a CG-hater on principle; my objection to the new Fist of the North Star series isn’t inherently that it’s CG. There are great CG anime studios, like Sanzigen, Orange, or Toei’s CG studio, who pack all of the character and motion of the best 2D anime into their works while doing things with their technology that only they can do. Even anime-style video games have largely figured out how to make the style look good in 3D. All these works have largely been accepted, even by discerning 2D nerds.
What’s wrong with this anime, from the small sample we have been given, is that the character animation is stiff and robotic; it doesn’t express any character. The 3D models of Rin and Bat look like puppets being jerked around stiffly, because they are. The 2D cuts— the classic scene of Ken bursting out of his leather jacket, and Shin surveying his kingdom— are more expressive than anything else in the trailer.
Comparisons to the disastrous 2016 Berserk series are typical otaku over-reactions, but it really just doesn’t look great: only a couple of notches better than the very ugly and jerky Fist of the Blue Sky: ReGenesis anime from a few years ago. I’ve seen better CG FOTNS animation on slot machines. The best I can say for the trailer is that the sequence of punches and kicks towards the end does a pretty decent job of expressing impact, and I liked the shattered-glass effect. The voice cast (Daiki Yamashita (Deku) as Bat, the ever-present MAO as Rin, and Shunsuke Takeuchi nailing all of Kenshiro's signatures) are also quite good from what we get of them.
The specific thing that makes anime work so well on people is a certain stylized expression of character that strikes us as, if not real, then true. Hard-working and detail-obsessed 2D animators make characters from Amuro Ray to Anya feel legitimately alive. Titles like the Bang Dream series and Girls Band Cry have such expressive CG characters that they immediately feel human to us. On the other hand, stiff characters like we see in the Fist trailer pull us out of the illusion animation is supposed to place us into.
Take a look at this concert scene from Girls Band Cry. This is what good CG anime looks like today. There is nothing robotic about this (presumably) motion-captured performance, especially not the singer's pained burst of raw human emotion. The standard for CG anime is up here, and though Kenshiro doesn't need to sing nor dance, the new Fist of the North Star just ain’t anywhere close.
On top of it all, big shonen titles, the reigning hits of the manga biz, don’t get this kind of middle-of-the-road treatment anymore. They’re treated as the prestige titles of the industry, anime’s Game of Thrones. Studios take their time with Attack on Titan or Chainsaw Man, because they and millions of fans want to see the absolute best adaptation possible. The original work is important enough to deserve it.
An all-time classic like Fist of the North Star— one which already has multiple high-quality adaptations, including a series of theatrical films that also look better than this teaser— deserves an absolutely royal treatment. Nothing short of the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure TV project is acceptable. If you can’t give a title this major an adaptation of the very highest quality from the best in the business, then you shouldn’t remake Fist of the North Star at all.
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