Back to zeyonaut's Profile zeyonaut's Profile

I chose this show to be my first introduction to this series, after hearing that it took a more 'serious' and 'faithful' approach to its adaptation. After dropping it shortly after, it was only out of sheer curiosity about its rating that I gave the original 2008 adaptation a chance. I only hope that I can prevent even one more person from making the same mistake I did: if Spice and Wolf interests you in the slightest, watch the original; this remake isn't worth your time.

Spice and Wolf is a simple narrative, and the potency of a narrative like it lies at the mercy of ... the way in which it is told. A remake presents a unique opportunity for a creator to improve this in innumerably many ways: raising the emotional impact of the cinematography and score, adjusting the pace of the story, reworking the dialogue and giving the cast a chance to have one more take.

Mystifyingly, in just about every way you can imagine, the remake has been a downgrade in various degrees of severity. To describe it with brevity, the remake does indeed take a 'serious' approach to its adaptation, if one is under the impression that seriousness involves surgically excising the comedy, tension, melancholy, dulling the emotional impact of every aspect of the story. Not even the pace of the narrative is spared: while nearly identical, save for the volumes covered, the original includes a charming slice-of-life episode in its first season which is entirely cut from the remake, save for the insertion of a few throwaway lines referencing its events. This is not a one-off misstep: 'tell, don't show' is a pattern in this show, especially among the choices it makes to distinguish itself from its predecessor.

A remake presents a unique opportunity for a reviewer to make substantial comparisons, rather than gesture vaguely at ill-defined qualities, when it comes to the technical aspects of storytelling. To that end, I'll compare a shared scene in two relatively plot-irrelevant episodes: the OVA of the original, and its counterpart in the remake. As far as adaptation goes, this is slightly out of order compared to the series of novels, but its position serves to give a sendoff to the first half while providing a cohesive framing to the events of the second.

In this episode, a character falls sick, and the narrative uses it as an opportunity to explore the story from their point of view. As they lie unconscious, their thoughts narrate a montage serving as a recap with previously unseen perspective. While the original takes this moment to provide brand new animated scenes, the remake chooses mostly to replay shots we have already seen before, interspersed with stills in a rather unsightly style, intended to represent dreams. The score of the original scene is upbeat, while the score of the remake is somber.

As the said character awakens, the original fades the score to the sound of crickets over silence, just as the visuals fade to a close-up of the character's face. The use of a match cut here gives a satisfying bridge between the last scene of the dream and their first scene as the character awakens, and after a brief moment, we cut out to a wide shot, which intends to elicit humor through the physical comedy of their situation. However, in the remake, there is no match cut; the melancholic music remains as the character awakens, and so the effect of physical comedy is entirely absent after the cut out, assuming the viewer even notices it in spite of the exceedingly dim lighting. All of these flaws are not one-offs, but endemic in the remake beyond the scenes remade one-to-one: a crude approach to cinematography and editing, a lack of delicacy in adjusting lighting and contrast, a lack of attention to the timing of the score and its ability to create meaningful emotional impact.

Even in this one side-story alone, there are far too many defects in storytelling to express in this review. Where the original obscures a facial expression of one character to allow to viewer to empathize with the surprise of another, or uses curvilinear perspective to create a sense of intimacy and accentuate visual comedy, the remake makes no such effort. Where the original provides an unnarrated dream sequence, inviting the viewer to infer the emotional state of a character, the remake replaces this with a narrated montage (yes, two narrated montages in one episode!) leaving nothing to the imagination. It is difficult to concretely describe the absence of engaging storytelling, such as in the last arc, which is unique to the remake, but the difference is as clear as night and day where both works coincide.

When I initially dropped this show, I left in boredom. But coming back to this after having experienced the original, I’ve only grown ever-more perplexed by pretty much every artistic decision made in the creation of this show. How exactly, with a modern animation pipeline and more than a decade of experience, did the cinematography, pacing, editing, writing, and voice directing get worse? This show does have one merit that might allow me to recommend it to someone: it’s a fascinating case study in how not to remake a classic.