The creators of Netflix’s Scott Pilgrim anime talk about adapting the comics

Earlier this month, at New York Comic Con, Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski sat down with io9 and a panel of journalists to discuss the upcoming anime. Scottish pilgrim Starts. Based on O’Malley’s graphic novels and reinventing the story that people fell in love with over and over again, the two spoke openly about it Show update beyond nostalgia and what it took to get the band back together.

When O’Malley and Grabinski began working on the show, they didn’t know they would be able to do it Get the same cast to voice their characters from the film. They ultimately came to the conclusion that if they couldn’t get everyone on board, they shouldn’t use any of the previous cast members. “We should just redesign the whole thing because it would feel so strange if there was almost everyone there and then one person sang,” O’Malley said. “We definitely talked about it, but luckily everyone said yes pretty early on.”

He further explained: “I think within 15, 20 minutes [of sending the first email]that at least one person responded, ‘I’m in.'” Before we go too much further, know that every journalist has been threatened, even semi-playfully, with some very angry emails if we reveal any spoilers should. So that’s all we can tell you about without Netflix PR making us forget Scott Pilgrim takes off!

The setting of Scott Pilgrim takes off is freed from traditional time and place restrictions. It’s Toronto. Sometime in 20XX. It actually takes place during Scott Pilgrim Time. “Scott Pilgrim Time is a funny thing that Brian keeps saying,” Grabinski said, “because we both have different ideas about when that takes place… it’s always on my mind.” Scott PilgrI’m like 2010, and I can’t even tell you why. So our idea of ​​the Scott Pilgrim Time is somewhere in the big time period from about mid-2000 to 2010. So we just decided there would be AD and then Scott Pilgrim and then the show would happen.”

Grabinski also says the show is very rooted in its era, even if it’s not tied to a specific year. “I don’t know how these people could ever exist in another time period. I think a lot of who they are, what they do, and what their passions are come from that time. I think if you shift it to the present, you would have to rethink everything. And I don’t think I’m capable of just figuring out what Envy Adams would be in the age of TikTok.”

But only because Scott Pilgrim Time stayed the same (as did Scott Pilgrim Time). may stay the same), O’Malley knew they needed to update the story a bit. “It definitely liked having more Ramona,” O’Malley said. “But not just Ramona. Ironically, we wanted to try to get more out of everyone except Scott…We found a way to work with other characters a little bit more and look at Scott from new angles.”

O’Malley described having a college backstory for Ramona and Roxie that he could never have portrayed in the graphic novels. “That was something I wanted to kind of incorporate into the show.” Grabinski added, “We felt like we had a really good opportunity to just add more shading [Ramona] and make them more complicated and interesting. And that was really one of the biggest north stars for the project.”

There are also the complicated problems of the villains; the seven evil ex-partners around whom the plot more or less revolves. “I could have done a lot more with it [villains] in the books,” O’Malley said. So when he got the chance to give them a little more depth, he wanted to jump in. “Once we agreed on the plot for this version, I really liked doing those scenes and having more villain scenes. ”

Grabinski is excited for fans to see new sides to old characters. “It was very nice to have scenes with characters together that you hadn’t seen before… We really wanted to do Knives [Chau] some unexpected storylines that have nothing to do with her relationship with Scott. Some of my favorite things about the show involve her.” O’Malley also loved the scenes with Lucas Lee. “He was really special. When we were writing the show, we thought, ‘Oh, we could write this character forever.'”

The ultimate goal of Scott Pilgrim takes off was “to make the story readable for people who have never seen it Scottish pilgrim or never read the books,” O’Malley said. “Those are the story beats kind of still there, even if the story has been greatly changed. But ultimately I just had to put the books down after the first day of writing… I didn’t want to be too committed to them. I wanted to just feel the story and not do something like a transliteration of the books… I think every time you do something like that, it just develops in its own direction. And we really had to accept that.”

The trick was to get into Scott Pilgrim Time. Back to the semi-mythical year of 2020, when the books take place. “What I had to do specifically was write the characters the way I would have written them back then,” O’Malley said. “And try not to think about the actors and the fans and everything that has happened in the last 15 years.”

Scott Pilgrim takes off will premiere on Netflix on November 17, 2023 at 3:00 pm ET.

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