If you've followed anime for any length of time, it quickly becomes clear most of it is derived from other works -- manga, mainly, but also light novels, conventional fiction and plenty of other sources. It's a "target" medium, in the same way many other things are re-made into movies (including, well, other movies).
It takes a certain mindset, one not all that hard to slip into, to say that anything adapted from another work is somehow inferior to an original creation. Original invariably equals better. There's a grain of truth to that, but it's not as big a grain as we like to think, and I don't think it's any bigger in anime than it is anywhere else.
Let's start with the obverse of the above assertion. If original is better, then that implies anything adapted from anything else is somehow lacking -- or, at best, it will never rise above a certain level. It takes very little effort to demolish this.
Here is a quick list of anime adapted from other media:
- Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
- Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (and Ghost in the Shell itself)
- Kuragehime (Princess Jellyfish)
- Mushi-shi
- Ouran High School Host Club
- xxxHOLiC
... and so on. "Lacking" is the last word I would use to describe any of this material. As with any other medium-to-medium reworking, it's all about what you end up with and not what you start out with. The fact that sometimes the source material is lousy says a lot less about the process than it does about that individual product.
Now here's a list of anime that are not derived from anything else, but were created from whole cloth, as it were:
And let's not forget a fair number of Studio Ghibli / Hayao Miyazaki's works, most of which are original creations (although they have done their share of adaptations).
(Note that while some of these have, say, manga editions, those were all produced after the original TV series and derived from it.)
Here's my point: I don't seriously see the point in arguing that the list at the bottom is in some way morally or aesthetically superior to the list at the top. Any of the shows from the first list are contenders; I wouldn't feel as if I were shortchanging myself by preferring one over the other.
One thing I can't argue with is how creating an original series is both that much more logistically difficult but also that much more rewarding for the creator. This is something Dai Sato (screenwriter for Ergo and Eureka and creator of Eden) has talked about before. Fewer people are willing to take a risk on a totally new, unknown property; they feel safer, as does Hollywood, banking on something that has "name recognition" (e.g., an existing comic).
I'm currently in the process of re-watching Mardock Scramble: The First Compression, the first of three OVAs produced from Tow Ubukata's excellent trilogy of novels published in English earlier this year. (Compare prices on the novel and the OVA.) It does have the flavor of something that was written directly for the screen and not adapted from some other material, even though I know full well it's an adaptation.
Maybe it's that particular feeling which draws the attention most: the feeling that you are watching something that is daring to be a little different, pushing envelopes, not settling for just reiterating something already tried and known to be good. But it seem that feeling isn't solely due to whether or not the show in question was adapted from something else.
Image: Mardock Scramble © TOW UBUKATA / MS COMMITTEE. Image courtesy Section 23 Films.
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