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Even for those who have read the comic, seen the film or played the video game version, the anime will hold surprises. (There was a robust list of topics and guest voice actors that reporters were asked not to spoil.) O\u2019Malley and Grabinski came to the New York Times offices last month to discuss the new series, reuniting the movie cast and what comes next for Scott Pilgrim. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.<\/p>\n
How did the anime come about?<\/strong><\/p>\nBENDAVID GRABINSKI <\/strong>Bryan found out that Netflix and Science Saru were interested. We went to dinner to talk about the pros and cons of doing a straight adaptation.<\/p>\nBRYAN LEE O\u2019MALLEY <\/strong>This was like a year after they asked. So I was a little reticent because I didn\u2019t have a great idea. But then BenDavid had a series of great ideas at this dinner. He\u2019s a traditional Hollywood screenwriter who will just walk into a room and make up a bunch of stuff.<\/p>\nWere there specific characters you knew you wanted to focus on in this version?<\/strong><\/p>\nGRABINSKI <\/strong>I wanted to spend as much time as I could with the ensemble. The main appeal of the show to me was to dig deeper with the exes, with Scott\u2019s friends, with Ramona.<\/p>\nO\u2019MALLEY <\/strong>People always ask, \u201cWhat\u2019s your one regret?\u201d I wish I could have done more with the evil exes, partly because I didn\u2019t fully understand them. The first thing I think of when I think of anime is villain scenes. That was my first way in, and then BenDavid blew the doors off after that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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What\u2019s new about the series?<\/strong><\/p>\nGRABINSKI <\/strong>We will say that there are some big twists and turns that no other adaptation of this story has done yet. The great thing about making this show and having Bryan sitting five feet away is I have the guy who can veto things and say, \u201cI never would have written that joke,\u201d or \u201cI don\u2019t think that guy would do that.\u201d As much as I would like to feel like every single thing in there is my idea, there\u2019s an equal amount of ideas that I pitched where Bryan would politely text me back and say, \u201cThat\u2019s not \u2018Scott Pilgrim.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\nO\u2019MALLEY <\/strong>And sometimes less politely.<\/p>\nGRABINSKI <\/strong>Yeah, I\u2019m just trying to be nice about it. That\u2019s the benefit of knowing each other for so long: You can be a little bit more blunt. This would not have worked if we didn\u2019t know each other very well, because we\u2019re both incredibly opinionated people. We just had a rule from the beginning that nothing could go on the show that either of us hated.<\/p>\nO\u2019MALLEY <\/strong>You want it to be unpredictable, but the surprises have to be satisfying. That\u2019s the goal every single time.<\/p>\nWere there conflicts?<\/strong><\/p>\nGRABINSKI <\/strong>Our episodes are very different, as the audience will see once they watch it. We never want it to feel stale, but it does need to feel consistent.<\/p>\nO\u2019MALLEY <\/strong>We both love episodic TV, so we wanted to embrace that.<\/p>\nGRABINSKI <\/strong>I didn\u2019t want to have something like, \u201cOh, it\u2019s a four-hour movie that\u2019s split into chunks.\u201d We wanted the episodes to feel like episodes, but the season is one story with a beginning, middle and end.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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What was it like getting the film cast back together?<\/strong><\/p>\nO\u2019MALLEY <\/strong>They\u2019ve all blown up.<\/p>\nGRABINSKI <\/strong>I have to give thanks to Edgar Wright. One, he put together one of the best ensemble casts of all time. And two, they all loved the experience so much that we benefited from that. After we started making the show, he reached out to the cast. He sent them the scripts and they immediately all said yes. We can\u2019t take credit for the returning cast members. Guest stars, yes.<\/p>\nO\u2019MALLEY <\/strong>I had some involvement casting back then. He showed me every casting tape. So it\u2019s really cool to have seen all those people flower so much and to get a chance for them to come back and revisit that work with their newfound maturity. The same way I feel about it, looking back and revisiting and finding new shading, the way we were finding it in the writing, they found in the acting. There\u2019s a profound feeling to it and I love that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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Is it the art that makes it an anime? Or is it more about the sensibility?<\/strong><\/p>\nO\u2019MALLEY <\/strong>For me it\u2019s just because we\u2019re working with Science Saru: They are an anime studio. There\u2019s a certain method of production and we had to slot ourselves into that. We\u2019re not telling them what to do, other than giving them scripts. They are very autonomous.<\/p>\nGRABINSKI<\/strong> Our feedback is about emotion or plot points. We wanted it to feel specific to their sensibilities. A lot of the time it became like a feedback loop where we would rewrite our scripts to match the things they were doing.<\/p>\nO\u2019MALLEY<\/strong> Abel G\u00f3ngora is the director, so we wanted to give him all the autonomy. Each episode is storyboarded by different artists. They\u2019re all Japanese artists, other than him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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GRABINSKI <\/strong>The music and the cast, we\u2019re extremely involved with.<\/p>\nO\u2019MALLEY <\/strong>That was the one aspect we wanted to control, because it\u2019s so crucial to the tone of \u201cScott Pilgrim\u201d to get that music correct.<\/p>\nAre any of the characters more fun to write than the others?<\/strong><\/p>\nGRABINSKI <\/strong>I love Lucas Lee [played by Chris Evans] just because I\u2019m pretty obsessive about action movies. There\u2019s a tone to that character that is so fun to me. But honestly, the great thing is that they\u2019re all so different. I\u2019ve worked with Brandon Routh a lot and I knew he could be really funny, and we got him to do a bunch of stuff that I think is unexpected and very silly, and he embraced it.<\/p>\nO\u2019MALLEY <\/strong>It\u2019s like each of the exes has their own genre, and it lets you mix it up.<\/p>\nGRABINSKI <\/strong>That was the thing that was most exciting to me: pairing up characters who had never been seen together. What if they fought or what if they became best friends?<\/p>\nO\u2019MALLEY <\/strong>But not making it feel like fan fiction. Really bringing weight to it.<\/p>\nGRABINSKI <\/strong>The difficult thing is trying to make sure it all feels like an organic part of the story. As much as we think, \u201cOh it would be really fun to have these two characters fight,\u201d we can\u2019t do that unless there\u2019s a real reason that they want to fight that comes from the story.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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What\u2019s next? Will there be a Season 2?<\/strong><\/p>\nGRABINSKI <\/strong>I can\u2019t think about anything beyond this. I\u2019m glad that we told a story that has an ending for all the thematic things that we\u2019re exploring. So if TV stopped existing on Nov. 18th, I\u2019d feel really proud of what we did.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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O\u2019MALLEY <\/strong>We wanted to be satisfied with what we get if we never get more. I don\u2019t love it when a show feels like a setup for Season 2. We just wanted to have a complete dramatic and comedic arc to everything.<\/p>\nHow long did the entire production process take?<\/strong><\/p>\nGRABINSKI <\/strong>It was a few years to go from the beginning of doing outlines to the finish.<\/p>\nO\u2019MALLEY <\/strong>But it was also fast. We started writing in January 2022. We met Science Saru in June 2022. We were seeing episodes by spring of this year. We were pretty much done recording the voices before the strike started. So it was like 18 months. Saru is very fast, which is part of the appeal of this whole process. That\u2019s what they pitched me: \u201cWe\u2019ll do a season a year!\u201d It took a little longer than that, but it\u2019s pretty magical to get something this beautiful this quickly.<\/p>\nWill you revisit \u201cScott Pilgrim\u201d in comic book form?<\/strong><\/p>\nO\u2019MALLEY <\/strong>Even if I was super inspired, I wouldn\u2019t have time for it right now. But I think it\u2019s definitely possible. And we\u2019ve talked about other episodes. If those never got to fruition as TV, then I would definitely consider doing a comic and co-writing with BenDavid.<\/p>\nGRABINSKI <\/strong>I hope that someone, someday, does a manga adaptation of the show.<\/p>\nO\u2019MALLEY <\/strong>If someone in Japan would want to do their own adaptation without any input from us, that would be really cool.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Let’s get ready to rumble … again! Friday brings the premiere of “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” an anime series based on theRead More ›<\/a><\/button><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13745,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7828"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}