I think I was too preoccupied by what you said and looking at the carvings for differences that I never looked at the image as a whole. I'm not trying to be a negative Nancy, but I hate it. From the color scheme, the lighting, the scaling and the overall feel compared to the original image. And then changing up the subjects of the carvings somewhat arbitrarily. Bleh at the whole thing.
I agree 100% on the aesthetics: the first few chapters of ToG have an incredibly-striking rhythm of space, illumination, and scale—and enough so that I've always been skeptical an animated adaption
could possibly compare to how it plays out for me when I read it.
On the content, though, this is interesting on multiple levels.
The animation version makes the wall murals look much more obviously "greek" than before (when they had more of a "chinese landscape painting" impression). I find this encouraging for my theorizing because I think ToG incorporates a lot of structural elements from greek mythology—not just names, but thematic elements, story components, and so on (...this isn't the thread for that). So that's encouraging.
I'd never looked this closely at the original version, though, and it's interesting: the panel on the left appears to be a woman wrapped in a cloak/shawl/etc., and then the center panel clearly has a similarly-wrapped figure offering something up to the "dragon"—
probably a swaddled baby, going by size and appearance. Going out on a limb, I'm guessing that's SIU's initial draft of Arlene and then Arlene "offering Baam"—maybe the "dragon" is symbolic of offering him up to the "outside god", maybe SIU changed his plans down the line (keeping the "offered up", but changing the how and to whom?...a revision like that might explain the ambiguity vis-a-vis whether or not Baam's cave was properly outside the tower).
Looking at the animation version of the "dragon" there's still what looks like a figure, and it's updated to look like how we usually see Arlene—long hair and from the back; if she's still offering up a baby I can't make it out in that screen grab.
I have no clue who the "giant" is in the original and no clue who "zeus" might be in the animation.
For the leftmost panel in the animation, it seems like it's pretty close to White's demon—maybe reflecting that SIU's thinking has evolved such that the "demons" will be more significant to the story arc.
