Miike Takashi’s Crows Zero and adaptive authorship revisited

Abstract

Abstract This article contributes to the scholarship on Japanese director Miike Takashi, who has gained increasing international recognition over the past two decades. Through a case study of Miike’s manga-inspired live-action film, Crows Zero (2007), I delve into specific aspects of the film’s settings, especially poetry and linguistic sings, to explore authorship from a comparative perspective and its manifestation in transmedia adaptation. This analysis draws upon Thomas Leitch’s concept of adaptive authorship and rethinks the historical dichotomy between the auteur and the metteur-en-scène, as originally delineated by François Truffaut. By arguing that Miike’s role in the film is neither a mere adapter lacking creativity nor a consistent artist, and by highlighting instances of directorial authorship in the film’s nuanced details, I question the tendency in film studies that adaptive authorship is often overshadowed by, and eventually integrated into, auteurship to the point where it can only be examined within broader auteurist analyses. Thus, this case study underscores the advantages of an adapter-based approach over an auteurist one, suggesting that moving beyond the doctrines of consistency and coherence may facilitate the identification of authorship from different perspectives.