Makin' It Mecha: Fruits Basket

 mirrorfalls said:

You have been offered an exorbitant sum of money to (somehow) remake Fruits Basket as a mecha series. What Do You Do?

Take it. I’ve got a plan.

 

Ok, this is 1) A long post and 2) Full of Fruits Basket SPOLIERS. Stop reading if you haven’t finished the entire manga.

 

Ok, so Fruits Basket as a mecha anime would probably bear a strong resemblance to the middle section of Evangelion, after it turned into a combination of mecha show and psychological drama but before all the surrealist nihilism.

 

The setting is the far, far future. Nations exist as people-groups rather than sovereign territories; no one alive remembers the last full-scale war. Honda Tohru’s mother dies in an accident and she ends up squatting on the property of the reclusive Sohma family while waiting for her grandfather to finish remodeling.

 

And the Sohma, for as long as they can remember, have been training in secret for an attack from outside Earth. To an outsider, it sounds silly—they’re expecting aliens to come! But this is more than expectation, it’s tradition, and the Sohma take tradition seriously.

 

Generations ago, the Sohma built mecha. Thirteen piloted suits, one named after each animal in the Chinese Zodiac, plus a fleet of automated units to serve as false enemies. To ensure that these units couldn’t be used by people from outside the family, they put a specific type of DNA lock on them, one that recognizes specific sequences that show up in Sohma family DNA (note: with an unlimited budget, I’d probably get a science consultant to help with this bit, since I am not that knowledgeable about DNA). Ever since, the robots have been passed down through the family to descendants with the right DNA, along with the legacies of their original pilots. The Rat pilot is always the ace, for example, and the Ox pilot is generally expected to be stupid. But then there’s the issue with the Cat unit—piloting it mutates people, and even Sohma tech is only good enough to cover up those mutations, not reverse them.

 

Tohru stumbles into the Sohma’s secret world by accident. Normally, they’d just wipe her memories, but Akito, the head of the family and “God of the Zodiac” who pilots the automated units and can seize control of the other units, is curious about how she’ll affect the pilots. So Tohru finds herself knee-deep in the interpersonal dramas of a family that expects disaster constantly, in which children are taken from their mothers immediately after birth to be tested for their suitability as pilots, and in which relationships for members of the Zodiac are all but forbidden. She watches as the Sohma attend school and then participate in piloting exercises afterward and on weekends.

 

Her goal in all of this shifts from “brighten the lives of her housemates” to “end the Zodiac pilot system,” as she falls in love with the pilot of the Cat unit and then finds out that he, like every Cat pilot before him, will be locked in a cell on Sohma territory after graduation and released only to pilot in exercises.

 

In her quest to end the system, Tohru delves into the history of the Zodiac pilot system. Eventually, even as the system is falling apart, the original promise that started the system is revealed. The longstanding tradition started as an effort to reassure a nervous cousin, nothing more. There was never any real indication that aliens were coming. But as the first “God of the Zodiac” became drunk on power and his Zodiac enjoyed each training fight, they lost their original purpose and started taking themselves too seriously. The Cat pilot rebelled, and tried to leave, trying to make his machine inoperable in his wake. But the Zodiac he left behind just decided to find another pilot, one that they could force into piloting.

 

Eventually, the ending would be very much like the ending of the manga, starting with the Kureno reveal and leading up to a more action-y version of the scene where Akito and Tohru meet in the woods.  Also there’d be symbolic robot destruction and also probably Kyo getting gene therapy or the futuristic equivalent thereof.

 

With an unlimited budget, I’d spend a lot on getting a good voice and animation cast. The animation cast would be focused on doing background shots and facial expressions, with a special unit devoted to making the mecha fights look good. But there’d be a lot of zoomed-out shots with Makoto Shinkai-type skies in the background and the whole thing would probably be very washed-out, color-wise—closer to Natsuki Takaya’s Twitter sketches in palette than to the current anime.

 

The thing is that it was Takaya-sensei’s editors, not Takaya, who suggested the animal transformations. They’re important and useful and funny, but the core of the curse was always the “promise” that warped into a “bond”—which can be anything, even a bunch of genetically-locked robots.

 

Also, the above summary sounds super-serious, but I would keep as many jokes from the original Fruits Basket as possible. Especially the running gag about Shigure’s house getting destroyed (gotta crash a robot into it once), but also most of Haru and Ayame’s gags and every single Manabe Kakeru appearance ever.

 

Finally, while I’m making changes, I would tone down Kagura’s tsundere stuff and Shigure’s perviness. Also Ritsu would be a trans woman and if possible I would let some of the ambiguously bi characters like, say, Haru and Ayame, be actually bi.