Junji Ito has become a household name when people talk about horror manga. He began his career with his first publication, Tomie, on the then-respected Shojo Horror Magazine Monthly Halloween in 1987.
35 years later, Ito-sensei has now attained the status of a legendary mangaka, with works like Uzumaki, Frankenstein, and his numerous anthologies of short stories under his belt.
Usually, people read his manga with awe and reverence but little do they know that some of his stuff is based on material that was deemed a disappointment by its own creator.
And one of them is the aforementioned Frankenstein.
Junji Ito’s Frankenstein was a manga adaptation of a controversial Robert De Niro Movie
During an interview with Junji Ito at the 50th Angoulême International Comics Festival in April 2023, he stated that his manga “Frankenstein” is an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein film, which itself is a faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel of the same name.
It was directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also stars as Victor Frankenstein, with Robert De Niro portraying Frankenstein’s monster.
Ito-sensei had enough time to draw the manga as his editor informed him several months before the release of the movie.
He was worried whether his manga would do it justice, as he made only a few adaptations of pre-existing scenarios at that time. But he basically went, “F*ck it, why not try?“
The manga turned out to be fantastic and received quite well amongst his fans but the movie from which he referenced had problems.
It turned out that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein film was very different from how the original screenwriter depicted it and that the director changed a lot of things that took quite a bit from the original novel’s subtle tone of storytelling.
The original screenwriter for the film, Steph Lady, referred to the movie as “a shocking disappointment” and criticized the director for turning a poignant, thought-provoking tragical story into a heavy metal monster movie.
He even took jabs at Robert De Niro as well, saying that the actor’s role as the monster did not suit him at all.
The second screenwriter for the movie, Frank Darabont, revealed that it’s kind of like the movie he wrote, but not at all like the movie he wrote at the same time.
It has no patience for subtlety. It has no patience for quiet moments. It has no patience period. It’s big and loud and blunt and rephrased by the director at every possible turn. Cumulatively, the effect was a totally different movie. I don’t know why Branagh needed to make this big, loud film … the material was subtle.
Shelley’s book was way out there in a lot of ways, but it’s also very subtle. I don’t know why it had to be this operatic attempt at filmmaking. Shelley’s book is not operatic, it whispers at you a lot. The movie was a bad one. That was my Waterloo.
So if the film Junji Ito was trying to draw into a manga flopped hard even from the eyes of the staff, then how did the mangaka turn it into a masterpiece?
Junji Ito’s Frankenstein succeeded because he did what the film’s director should have done
Like all comic book and manga enthusiasts, Junji Ito did not stop at merely watching the movie but went to the original source—the original Frankenstein novel by Mary Shelley, and what he realized was quite shocking.
He found that many of the novel’s deep philosophical aspects and annotations weren’t even there in the movie. And so he decided to be close to the soul of the novel, as he felt it was really important to him.
He knew the pain of book authors receiving poor TV or film adaptations of their work. In fact, Junji Ito’s fans had been disappointed with anime adaptations of his works other than Uzumaki.
But that didn’t stop Ito-sensei from using his creative mind to make some minor tweaks to the story, which, amusingly, the director of the film had exactly thought and done.
This piece of information made Junji Ito fans respect him even more, as they eagerly await for the Uzumaki anime series to hit the streaming platforms.
Uzumaki is going to be released on September 28 on Toonami to be streamed.
