A bit of a change of pace for this What’s the Difference? with Wisecrack diving into the key difference between the Netflix version of Death Note and the Manga and Anime.
I was first exposed to Death Note via the Japanese live-action film adaptation. It was an intriguing and decent film (with some pretty dodgy CGI for Ryuk). That lead me to watch the Anime TV adaptation, which is excellent, if just a bit heavy handed. I have to admit to reading very little of the Manga because I kinda felt like the Anime had covered it really well.
When I saw they were releasing an American version of Death Note on Netflix, I was all over it. I didn’t expect the dense and loquacious Anime, but was thinking they’d remake the film adaptation with better CGI, no subtitles (because Americans don’t read), and star some former Disney child actors looking to do something gritty but lucrative to make sure the mouse didn’t throw their souls into the volcano under Disney Land. What we got was 90 minutes of garbage.
On the Wikipedia page for the American Death Note film, it is described as “loosely adapted from the Japanese Manga”. The word loosely is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that description.
The above video does a pretty good job of covering what the film does wrong. Not different, wrong. The film really does feel like someone saw that Death Note was successful, so they bought the rights, got a director to read the elevator pitch for the series (kid gets the power to kill people by writing in a demon’s book), and thought that was all they needed to do. Everything about it is a failure to understand what Death Note was about. The characters are shallow and lack any value to the story. The story lacks any substance. And they managed to turn one of the most compelling sequences from the Anime into a chase scene involving the wrong characters.* Because every American film needs a chase scene… In short, they made a bad film and an even worse adaptation.
The main thing to remember about Death Note is that they’ve already made a very good adaptation with the Anime.
* See this video that discusses the scene from the Anime I’m referring to.
How does Netflix’s Death Note adaptation hold up to the original?
The anime version of Death Note, which is a faithful adaptation of the original manga, is one of our all-time favorites. So how does it compare to the not-so-beloved 2017 Netflix version? Let’s find out in this “Book” (aka Anime) vs. Film: Death Note
Tyson Adams 
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