Adi Shankar has a lot on his plate, with the Executive Producer of Castlevania working on animated adaptations of Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix, Devil May Cry, and PUBG to name a few. In the past, Shankar had stated that a dream project of his would be to adapt the dark manga series known as Berserk. With the Band of the Hawk having a varied track record as an anime, Comicbook.com was able to pick Shankar’s brain about how he would approach the story by creator Kentaro Miura.
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In talking with Comicbook.com, we were able to ask Adi if he felt that adapting the masterpiece manga by Kentaro Miura was an impossible task, with the producer stating that he didn’t see it as impossible, “Nothing is impossible. Everything in the world out there was once considered impossible, like space travel and skyscrapers. All of it sounds crazy. If you can think it, it can be done.”
Can A Western Berserk Happen?
Further in our discussion, Shankar took the example of The Witcher and its adaptations to heart, since the story of Geralt is one that blends the supernatural with an aesthetic quite like Berserk’s in its European feudalistic style, “All these properties are vastly different. If you look at something like The Witcher, it’s a literary property. To me, The Witcher is one thousand percent a literary property. It’s cool, you can put Geralt in all these different situations and the world is a Polish fantasy world, so you stick with the literature. The art style in that example is open to interpretation. For The Witcher, and Berserk, you have to make a clear decision as to how much should you ground it in reality and its own sense of gravity. Those things can be movable to a degree.”
Shankar then explained that he felt in creating a Berserk adaptation, it was important to harness the themes Miura put forth, noting that he would be extremely cognizant when it came to bringing the Band of the Hawk back to animation, “What makes Berserk appear challenging is that it’s a literary property with a distinct visual style that you have to preserve. It’s a marriage between these two pillars, but you have to preserve the two pillars. It’s a balancing act because you always have to speak to the hardcore audience, but you also have to know what to interject versus what would be blasphemous to put in. You need to think about the intent of the author and you have to preserve what Kentaro Miura wanted.”
