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The question deserves an answer, if only because the number of adaptations are increasing. I would also broaden the discussion to add movies made of comic books. These include Men in Black, originally an independent comic reprinted by Marvel (and wrongly attributed as a Marvel comic in the film credits) and Howard the Duck (which, when written by its creator Steve Gerber, was a bitterly funny, savage satire on media heroism of all kinds).
Despite the increase in animation fandom, great masses of people still perceive cartoons as kid stuff. Despite great inroads by movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, people still have the age-old American prejudice against drawn figures, whether animated or not. They believe it's juvenile stuff, simple stories with sex and violence. I won't take the space to talk about the hypocracy of this; look at the media writings of Harlan Ellison and Peter David.
There's another reason beyond adult hypocracy for these adaptations. Have you ever read "fan fiction" on the Internet? Everyone with literary pretensions would like to re-write the adventures of their favorite movie, comic and cartoon heroes, but they'd like to do it their way. "I know I could write Spawn better than Todd McFarlane," they say. (Well, just about anyone else could, but...)
So you have fans writing stories from the conventional to the extreme, from straight adventure to outright pornography. Heck, I even did it myself, with a bunch of other writers in an online forum; we did such a good job of putting every cartoon character aboard the Next Generation'sEnterprise that Paramount and Disney ordered us to cease and desist.
But what about the studio executives? People who don't write (or read), but who want to lay their mark (usually greasy thumbprints) on the characters in their productions?
Do you realize how hard it is to make your mark on animated productions if you're not an animator? If you're a dealmaker, you want to spend your time wining and dining future projects at Morton's, not watching over some old guy with a pencil drawing pictures. It's easier to use studio executive shmoozing skills on live people with similar interests, not lowly peons like...artists. So, studio execs prefer making live-action movies to animated films.
And isn't this animation too much work? After all, to the modern Hollywood executive, there are no more "films that will live forever," except in PR hype. The films are disposable. You treat them like cooked spaghetti; you cook them up, throw them against the refrigerator, and see if they stick. You set up deals to produce half-a-dozen science fiction movies, run all of them in the summer, and hope that one will be the Star Wars or Men In Black that will pay the burial costs of the other five films.
Remember that animation is more than just a form of making films; it is an art form requiring devotion. And to today's executives (and not just Hollywood executives, either) it's dangerous to believe in anything outside of "success" or "market dominance" or the other bland platitudes they talk about in cheesy executive seminars. If you're too passionate about anything, and fail, you are marked as a fool, and you lose your limo. To do great things in the roulette wheel of life, you must be willing to put all your chips on a single number, and that's why Hollywood rarely does great things; the ideal Hollywood exec puts one chip on every number.
Sometimes, even a string of equally-bad failures won't teach the executives a lesson. Look how often Marvel Comics' characters were made into live-action films that died terrible deaths; The Punisher, Captain America, The Fantastic Four. Even the best project done of a Marvel series, The Incredible Hulk, was run to death - literally, in the TV-movie The Death of The Incredible Hulk. The Hulk concluded his days as a front man, introducing other minor Marvel characters like Daredevil and The Mighty Thor - throwing them on the refrigerator to see if they would stick, if they could become the basis for a series. Meanwhile, the animated versions of these characters are doing respectable business in the Spider-Man animated series.
So, expect the bad trend of live-action versions of cartoon characters to continue. It's a film process that fits the prejudices of movie executives. And, whether it makes economic sense or not, whether it's sane or not, people always play to their prejudices. That's true of animation fans, too. Why else do American otaku insist that anime is only acceptable when it's in Japanese, and you must learn that language or you can't enjoy the cartoons?
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