This week marks the start of the Moyashimon live action TV-series. Beyond the cute bacterias… like every good manga turned into a drama… the drama produced was completely different from the manga. AGAIN.

Can’t these drama folks keep the story as it is, the way the people have loved it in the manga, the way that the manga is popular to begin with? For those who have followed dramas, we have seen how in the likes of Yoshinaga Fumi’s Antique, they had to make Ono straight rather than gay. Now… they kind of jumbled the story line of Moyashimon, turned Kei into a girl and… I… whatever happened to the relaxed pace of my bacterial manga!?! Everything bursted out of this comic like hiochi that the sudden skips from this to that made the story lose its laidback yet interesting turn of events.

It’s insane and I’m not exactly sure if I’m disappointed just yet. The series does run for thirty minutes and I suppose they’re trying to make things as compact as they can to integrate plots that came after the anime. Then again, I have a feeling these guys won’t be travelling to France.

On the other hand… the hiochi/kiviak scene was really strange. In a dank, damp, place like that, would the kiviak even ferment? Honestly. What were these guys thinking?!

It may sound that I’m being a manga purist, but I’d like to believe that there are reasons why they animate/dramatize manga stories and the strongest of which is the story’s own good story line. Hence, why would they change it? Why would they try to make the flow of the story different?

Sometimes I wonder if it’s really the artistic interpretation of the director however… didn’t the author have a say in the production of his own work as well? Sometimes I wonder if the mangakas allow the changes because this is how they foresaw their story but failed to put it in print. However, sometimes I think that the mangakas may have been too nice to really say a word or may have been too cooped up in their own manga duties that they didn’t have the time to oversee the creative direction of the work. I mean if the Korean version of Antique Bakery managed to pull of the gay and everything else in the story quite successfully, and the Taiwanese managed to follow HanaKimi quite faithful to the manga. I don’t understand why the Japanese have to change these things.

As much as I love Moyashimon, I’m going to have to force myself to stop twitching at every change they made to the story I love. Fundamentally, the story is still the same it’s just… it’s weird. Then again even the anime version of Moyashimon was just as weird for me. It’s still to early in the game to throw the hatchet though. Besides, the 3D integration of the bacteria is just awesome.