What “Kaiju Girl Caramelise” Taught Me About Adaptations
Kaiju Girl Caramelise by Spica Aoki is a romance story with one heck of a monstrous premise. Kuroe Akaishi is an outcast high school girl suffering from a peculiar illness that transforms parts of her body into that of a kaiju whenever she falls susceptible to a teenage romance protagonist’s biggest weakness: heightened emotions. An anime series adaptation by Liden Films premiered earlier this week, but it wasn’t the first time that this story caught my eye.
Back in 2021, I was in my third-year of a BA in Writing & Film Studies, and enrolled on a module about adaptations. Our assignment for the module was to write a 20-page short film screenplay based on an existing property of our choosing - rights be damned (it was for educational purposes, after all!). I had just discovered Spica Aoki’s manga, and was immediately charmed by it. I loved how such a ridiculous premise could be home to such a sweet romance as the sullen and sometimes feisty Kuroe begins to open up to Arata Minami, a popular boy who at first seems to have everything, but has a hole beneath the surface. It was heartfelt, it was crazy, and I wanted to take a crack at it. So, I did.
Over the course of the module, I worked on a 20-page short film adaptation of Kaiju Girl Caramelise. Even though I was working with someone else’s story as the base, the process taught me a lot about the fundamentals of stories - the importance of staying true to a core “theme”, maintaining a consistent character voice, and other skills that better my originals as well. The process also gave me a deeper appreciation of the work that goes into adaptations. You would think that manga being a visual medium would make adapting it to screen easy, right? Wrong! Being an introvert, Kuroe has a really activate internal monologue, much like the protagonist of a novel. Manga and even anime tend to be more forgiving with giving us direct access to a character’s inner thoughts, but I was writing for a class accustomed to live-action, so I had to adapt the story within the conventions of that medium. That meant having to find ways to express Kuroe’s feelings in other ways - either through dialogue in a way that felt natural for her, or through her physicality and body language.
The different mediums also have an impact on story structure. The original Kaiju Girl Caramelise manga has been serialised in Monthly Comic Alive since 2018, so has a lot more time to tell its story than a 20-minute short film. I remember being sat in a table-read of my script, as my other classmates read it out and then offered constructive criticism. My teacher pointed out a brief scene, a conversation between Kuroe and her mother. She asked why it was there, to which I answered that it was in the manga. That’s not what she asked, however. She wanted to know the purpose of the scene and whether it actually advanced the story, given the more limited constraints of the short film medium. She was right, so even though it was a scene from the source material, it didn’t fit this version of the story and had to go. That was another lesson I learned about adaptations: unlike what most people online tend to think, you don’t need to be 1:1 with the source material (which is impossible across mediums anyway) - and in some instances, it can even be better not to.
To celebrate the premiere of the anime adaptation from Liden Films, I would like to share the result of that with you, alongside the accompanying critical commentary essay, where I had to compare my process to that of a film on the curriculum - in this instance, Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne, an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story “So Much Water So Close to Home”. Yes, I mention Raymond Carver and kaiju in the same essay. I liked doing stuff like that at university. This ended up being my highest graded work during my degree (we were told grades were capped at 70%, the equivalent of an A, but I ended up with 85%?!).
You can view the files below:
Yes, I changed the title as part of the adaptation process - looking back, I do regret that change. All of the character names and the Japan setting were retained, though.
I should reiterate that I do not own nor do I claim to own any rights related to “Kaiju Girl Caramelise”. I am only reproducing this past academic work for educational purposes, in the hopes that anyone studying screenwriting finds it and the accompanying essay useful in their own studies. Please support the original manga (available in print and digitally from Yen Press) , and the anime adaptation currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
