5 Forgotten Anime So Good They Deserve a Live-Action Series Now

Anime has officially entered the live-action era, whether Hollywood is ready for it or not. After One Piece showed that a live-action adaptation could actually do a decent job of staying true to what makes its source material special, the possibilities have started rolling out. Suddenly, the question isn’t whether an anime can work in live action. It’s which one should get the treatment next. But there’s one caveat—anime shouldn’t simply be adapted into a heavily Westernized version for general audiences. It should also be an opportunity to bring more Asian-American actors into roles based on primarily Japanese characters, rather than treating that part of the source material as something that needs to be changed.

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And there are plenty of possibilities hiding in plain sight. Some of the best candidates aren’t necessarily the newest or most obvious franchises, either. There’s a whole generation of classic anime that has been sitting around for decades with memorable characters, ridiculous situations, surprisingly heartfelt stories, and worlds that could be reimagined for television. These five stand out as particularly interesting possibilities—not because they would be easy to adapt, but because they could be a lot of fun if somebody got them right.

5) GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka (1999)

Some anime premises become harder to adapt as they get older. GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka has almost the opposite problem: its central idea still feels tailor-made for television. Eikichi Onizuka is a former biker gang member who decides to become a teacher, partly because he wants to meet attractive women, which is probably not the sort of motivation most schools put on a job application. Somehow, he ends up becoming exactly the teacher his troubled students need. Now, there is a Japanese live-action version, so this one would be interesting to see done with a Western twist. Take a Dangerous Minds approach with anime flair.

That’s what makes Onizuka such a great character. He’s immature, ridiculous, occasionally irresponsible, and yet genuinely willing to fight for his students when nobody else will. The stories can be hilarious one minute and surprisingly emotional the next, which gives a live-action series plenty of room to move between comedy and drama without feeling forced. Japan already produced a live-action GTO, but a new international adaptation could introduce Onizuka and his class to an entirely different audience. The premise doesn’t need much updating. Unfortunately for Onizuka, teenagers haven’t become any easier to deal with.

4) Ah! My Goddess (1993)

Before anime adaptations became dominated by giant battles and increasingly complicated fantasy worlds, there was Ah! My Goddess. This romantic comedy was built around an ordinary Japanese college student whose life changes forever after he accidentally calls a goddess hotline. Keiichi Morisato doesn’t exactly have the kind of luck you’d expect from somebody who gets a divine wish granted, but then again, his wish is to have one of the ladies from the line, Belldandy, stay with him. Things get very complicated from there, as you’d expect when a perfect woman moves in with a student. Soon enough, Belldandy’s sisters and a whole collection of supernatural problems enter the room.

The appeal of a live-action version is that the premise doesn’t actually require a massive budget to work. At its heart, Ah! My Goddess is a romantic comedy about an unlikely relationship. Keiichi and Belldandy are surrounded by increasingly ridiculous supernatural circumstances. There’s no reason why a live-action version couldn’t cast a Japanese-American student and set the show in a general American university—at the very least, although adopting a true Japanese setting would be ideal. Also, Belldandy, Urd, and Skuld give the story three very different female personalities to play with, while Keiichi is stuck trying to keep his life as normal as possible. That’s a pretty good setup for a television series. Done right, it could be charming, funny, and just supernatural enough to stand apart from the usual live-action fantasy adaptation.

3) Tenchi Muyo! (1992)

Tenchi Muyo! is the main sci-fi candidate on this list, which is exactly why it could be so much fun. The story begins with Tenchi Masaki discovering that his life is about to become considerably more complicated when a group of powerful, very chaotic women end up living around his family home. Then the aliens, space pirates, galactic royalty, and various supernatural complications start piling up. Before long, Tenchi’s quiet life is about as quiet as a spaceship launch.

Tenchi himself is relatively grounded, which gives the audience somebody to experience all the insanity through, while the supporting cast provides plenty of chaotic fun. Ryoko, Ayeka, Washu, and the rest of the cast are all wildly different, and that’s where much of the comedy comes from. Think Friends with some Star Wars and a whole lot of ’90s anime style. It would also give a modern adaptation plenty of room to expand the science-fiction side of the story rather than treating the anime purely as a romantic comedy. Tenchi Muyo! already has the ingredients. Somebody just needs to be brave enough to concoct a new formula that’s fit for live action.

2) Love Hina (2000)

Love Hina has one of those premises that sounds simple until you realize how quickly everything can go sideways. Keitaro Urashima becomes the manager of an all-girls dormitory while trying to fulfill a childhood promise to attend Tokyo University, a promise he made to a girl he had a major crush on in hopes that they could reunite someday. Unfortunately, his new residents aren’t exactly thrilled to have a clumsy guy suddenly responsible for their home. What follows is a romantic comedy built around misunderstandings, personalities constantly colliding, and Keitaro somehow surviving another day.

A modern live-action version could have a lot of fun with the basic setup while updating some of the older comedy for today’s audience. The dorm itself gives the series a natural ensemble structure, with each character bringing a different kind of chaos into the same location. Naru, Motoko, Shinobu, Mitsune, and the rest of the residents don’t need elaborate special effects to carry a scene. They just need to be funny, distinct, and capable of making Keitaro’s life progressively more complicated. That’s a formula television has been using forever. Love Hina just happens to bring Japanese culture, anime-style humor, and a very specific kind of romantic chaos along for the ride. The series creator, Ken Akamatsu, has interestingly become a politician who helps advocate for manga artists.

1) Ranma ½ (1989)

If there is one classic anime that feels almost suspiciously well suited to another live-action adaptation, it’s Ranma ½. Hot off the heels of a reboot, the premise alone practically writes the trailer: Ranma Saotome is a martial artist who has been cursed to transform into a girl whenever cold water hits him, returning to his male form with hot water. Add his arranged engagement to Akane Tendo, two families that barely know how to behave around each other, and a supporting cast full of people with their own bizarre problems, and there is more than enough material for a television series.

The real challenge would be capturing the comedy without making the whole thing feel like a special-effects exercise. Ranma ½ works because the curse is only one part of the chaos. Ranma and Akane’s relationship is the real engine, with their constant arguments, misunderstandings, and obvious inability to admit how much they care about each other. The martial arts give the series plenty of action, but the characters are what make it memorable. A live-action version wouldn’t need to reinvent Ranma ½. It would just need to understand why the original worked in the first place: take a completely ridiculous situation, give the characters genuine feelings, and then see how badly everything can go wrong.