Oh, my! Where did dragons go?
Dragons went somewhere warm and cosy. Not because they are frightening they should be stupid…
So well, it’s been ages! I guess some people thought I had finally given up writing in my blog. The fact is that, lately these days I’ve been fangirling (if the verb ever exists) about Discworld, so I haven´t watched much anime. I’m thinking about ordering some manga soon, so I may re-take blog-writing a bit more seriously in a few days. But now, let’s move on what I really wanted to talk about:
DRAGONS!
I think I’m including “Guards! Guards!” (the 8th novel in the Discworld series) in my “They should make an anime out of this” list, along with “Mort”. There’s nothing more amusing than a bunch of loveable losers trying to fight a dragon, a witty patrician taming rats in the cell he’s imprisoned in, a brethren made up of fools, and blushing men. Yes, blushing men, because there’s even some good romance. And a strong female character (well, actually in the Discworld novels most of female characters tend to be a bit bossy, and very rarely they play the “damsel in distress” role. Even if the play said role, they won’t play it in the usual way). I wonder how “Guards! Guards!” would turn out as an anime. I guess it would depend on the anime studio. Bones, for instance, would provide clean and amazing action scenes. Shaft would rather focus on the comedy bits, making them even more surreal. I can perfectly picture some artistic rendering of Captain Vimes blushing profusely at the sight of Lady Sybill. Blushing men should be the new moe (or better, Moegar). Enough of lolis, meidos and Kyoto Animation!
By the way, I commented some time ago that Discworld novels weren’t available in japanese. I take it back, since the other day I was browsing through Amazon Japan and I found the japanese translation of”Guards! Guards!” among others. And that made me quite curious. I’ve got the feeling it must be very difficult to translate Discworld novels into japanese, with all the plays on words and references to both popular culture and british literature. Even the spanish translations have to work very hard to retain all the elements from the original version, and well, at least there isn’t such a wide gap between english and spanish, both as languages and culture. Studying how the japanese translation managed to keep all the elements from the original work could make for an interesting field in translation research…
Well, sorry for the detour! As a final note, I’d like to add that if some japanese anime studio decides someday to adapt “Guards! Guards!”(or any other Discworld novel ) into an anime, I hope they take Paul Kidby’s illustrations as a model to do the character design.
And yes, many of you will say this a filler post.
The merry ol’ men of the City Watch! (And the dragon, of course)