Knights of the Zodiac guts a beloved anime franchise to make a pointless movie

polygon.com:

The good news is that Knights of the Zodiac, the 2023 live-action adaptation of the manga and anime series Saint Seiya, will immediately look familiar to longtime fans. The bad news is that it’s because the film seems to be primarily based on the 2019 Knights of the Zodiac: Saint Seiya CGI series, which fans widely consider a low point in Saint Seiya history. To be fair to that series and the 2023 movie, it’d take an immense effort for a live-action version to look as good as the classic anime adaptation of Masami Kurumada’s manga, a TV series that left such an impression that the series is getting a live-action Japanese/U.S. adaptation nearly four decades later. But it’s unclear why director Tomasz Baginski and his writers decided to abandon every element that made Saint Seiya so beloved in the first place.

First released in 1986, the Saint Seiya animetakes the time to slowly build its world around the reincarnation of the Greek goddess Athena and warriors called Saints (or Knights, in some translations). Their strength comes from harnessing their inner energy, called the Cosmos, and from their Cloths — mystical, ancient armors based on constellations, and distributed to the “worthy” by followers of Athena. The Saints use these tools to protect the goddess and mankind from threats, including other Greek gods.

Nothing in the ’80s anime is ever fed to the audience through such straightforward, clunky exposition, though. Viewers only get fragments of the story here and there, with some not coming into play until halfway through the series. The plot comes together over time into a fascinating whole. Mix that with brutal action and authentic character drama, and you have a show that was downright revolutionary when it first