Miike Takashi's Crows Zero and adaptive authorship revisited.

This article examines Japanese director Miike Takashi’s authorship through a case study of his 2007 manga-inspired live-action film *Crows Zero*, focusing on the film’s use of poetry and linguistic signs within its settings. Challenging traditional auteur theory, which emphasizes consistent thematic and stylistic signatures across a director’s oeuvre, the study employs Thomas Leitch’s concept of adaptive authorship to explore Miike’s creative role in adaptation beyond the auteur/metteur-en-scène dichotomy originally proposed by François Truffaut. The analysis highlights how *Crows Zero* incorporates classical Chinese poetry and symbolic imagery absent from its manga source, revealing a nuanced authorial imprint that complicates Miike’s categorization as either a mere adapter or a consistent auteur. Ultimately, the article argues that an adapter-based, comparative approach can uncover dimensions of film authorship overlooked by conventional auteurist criticism, especially in the context of prolific and versatile directors like Miike.