Movies based on popular long-running manga commonly cram in too much, from story lines to characters. This confuses nonfans, while often failing to satisfy fans, who complain about omissions — though the original comic may have run for thousands of pages in dozens of volumes.
When Nippon Television Network and its partners adapted Naoki Urasawa's best-selling — and lengthy — manga "20- seiki Shonen" ("20th Century Boys") to the screen, they dealt with this difficulty by making a trilogy of films — the Japan equivalent of "Lord of the Rings."
The original story, partly inspired by the Stephen King coming-of-age fictions "Stand By Me" and "It," is forbiddingly complex, with dozens of characters and plot lines. Nonetheless, director Yukihiko Tsutsumi has managed to put most of them on film. The first installment, released last August, earned a whopping ¥3.85 billion, and the producers, who sank ¥6 billion into the entire project, breathed a collective sigh of relief.