g_s_eri

I know MAPPA is already committed to adapting as much of Fujimoto's material as they dare (and they announced a movie of Chainsaw Man's Reze Arc just now) but I wanna go against the grain and say that his latest one-shot, Goodbye, Eri might work better if it was a fairly low-budget independent amateur production.

Think about it: Goodbye, Eri operates on a certain level of cinema verite to sell the underlying surrealism of the manga's latter third, while the paneling and storyboards feel less a fit for manga and more explicitly like a drawn take on (landscape) phone filming. It's achievable with animation (and even more achievable with the typical three or five-year gestation period for a big-budget JP anime movie) but I also feel like it'd add a layer of artifice that doesn't build to the point of what makes Goodbye, Eri so unique. Rather, I think a full production, live-action or animated, would take away from the intimacy that is at the heart of what makes the one shot so touching and arrestingly weird.

An amateur filmmaker, on the other hand, can get to that core truth more directly.

All they'd need is, at best, an iPhone 15 Pro and enough time to kill (really any phone made since 2019 will do). The shot order's already served on a silver platter, but the shots themselves can be whatever the director and cinematographer want or need them to be. Considering characters Eri and Yuta's parents are also co-producing Yuta's film, it's possible to have actors also have a hand in writing the adaptation, which again bolsters the direct-cinema look and feel. And with DaVinci Resolve's free version being immensely viable for even n00b-tier video makers and the rise of other free video editing software for phone use, it feels like Goodbye, Eri can be made with a small enough crew to retain a certain closeness that best propels the story trying to be told. This manga can be adapted for a relatively low budget without losing any of its charm, and a truly brilliant and confident filmmaker can draw out even more of that stylized feel without overwriting Fujimoto's vision.

But I can see how this approach would be hard to pull off. You can't copy The Blair Witch Project and predict that it'd have the same result -- I think Goodbye, Eri doesn't work if it's treated as a found-footage movie. And even if this is built up as an independent film (which it likely won't because of Shueisha), it'll still be subject to cost overruns that may or may not lead to a result that doesn't look amateurishly produced, and at that point might as well just go big-budget.

I can also see the merit of an anime adaptation: the same artifice that I fear would dull its point further may allow for a metanarrative reading, to say nothing about the fact that it allows MAPPA or any other studio to try new storyboarding and linework techniques that simply won't fly among TV viewers. We've already seen glimpses of it in Chainsaw Man's first run of twelve episodes, and the more muted colors and cinematic direction of that would work better here as the material naturally subdues every exuberant craving for sakuga.

Still, I do wonder if Goodbye, Eri is even gonna be adapted at all. What Tatsuki Fujimoto did in this one-shot is fresh, experimental, and wild enough that a full-motion adaptation may take away from his goal of creating a movie as a manga. It's already a good deconstruction of both storytelling forms, so it'd take someone special to reconstruct it on camera.