The entertainment medium is always overlapping, as there are plenty of video games that become movies and anime that get video games. Despite all this overlap, one combination gets disregarded considerably: fantasy book anime adaptations.
We’ve seen some great examples of this already in Howl’s Moving Castle and The Twelve Kingdoms, with the former being one of the most celebrated anime movies of all time. Despite this success, the idea of adapting fantasy novels into anime is still almost nonexistent.
Instead, most series get bad live-action movies like Eragon or television shows like The Magicians that do poorly because of the limited scope that comes with having to use CGI. Very few of these adaptations can find success because the magic and fantasy within most of these books are hard to make realistic.
Anime has no such limitations, as the art form allows artists to create all sorts of beautiful and fantastical imagery through the magic of drawing and animation. That is why we think that there need to be more anime adaptations of fantasy and books. These are the five that would be perfect picks.
The First Law
If there was ever a series that could be the Game of Thrones of anime, it’s Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy. This grimdark fantasy takes place in a world ruled by magic, told from the perspective of seven unique viewpoints.
Through each of these POVs, First Law shows the different hierarchies and personalities of the world. It features everything from a spoiled rich kid to a down and dirty fighter, to a former swordsman who tortures people for the government. It’s a colorful cast of characters that give you all sorts of different perspectives of the settings and events of the story.
The story unfolds and intertwines between each of these characters, boasting a lot of fantastical settings and fights that would look amazing if they were animated. Between Logen Ninefingers and Bayaz alone, there is enough potential for sakuga to fill up multiple seasons.
Just like Game of Thrones, its world is also massive, brimming with potential for spin-off series or sequel anime. The best part is that there is already a foundation for that, as Abercrombie made three standalone books set in the same world. He is also hard at work on a sequel series, making this the perfect long-form anime adaptation.
