Anime & Donghua

The japanese corporate mindset and the material conditions of japanese industries have a base superstructure relationship.

Yeah, I think if anything it's a similar issue that the literature being adapted is itself very frequently uninteresting and the adaptations, though certainly they usually add things, do not add nearly as much as they could.

Part of the reason for the huge emphasis on manga adaptation specifically is that you practically have the script and storyboard right there already, and it is rare for an anime to heavily emphasize elements requiring a lot of new storyboarding (exceptions include Bleach TYBW and Mob Psycho, and even still they are mostly the same).

But also of course another reason that applies to both cases is that capital is risk-averse, so producers overwhelmingly gravitate toward work that already has fans.

I feel like we've never complained that non-animated movies adapt literature too much.

Film and TV adaptations have consistently been widely panned as terrible across the board, at least by critics and people who have read the originals.

Anime used to be the same way, but now adaptations are actually pretty good most of the time as a result of sort of weird convergence of the LN, manga, and anime industries where it's almost like a pipeline for workshopping scripts in prose form.