Akira

[Henry Spencer]

Tetsuo is back! Way back in June, it was reported by Bloody-Disgusting that the live-action Akira project Warner Brothers was developing was apparently as "dead as a doornail." Some fans thought it was good news, others thought it was bad news (latter for me). After we posted that, I heard that apparently it wasn't true, and that a couple of big name screenwriters were actually working on a new draft of the script, because WB had paid a lot for the rights and wasn't going to let it die. Collider now confirms that Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, the guys previously who wrote Children of Men and Iron Man, have been working on Akira.

Collider says that Fergus and Ostby are "about to turn in their version of an Akira movie" and have been "hard at work trying to get the script right." As for the story, apparently it's still set in a post-apocalyptic "New Manhattan" (as opposed to Tokyo in the anime), as was originally announced in 2008, and will include the iconic motorcycle (seen above). This is still a priority for the studio and if Fergus and Ostby's script gets approval from the higher ups, it could go into production in 2010 for release in 2011. Though there still isn't a director attached, since WB ditched the inexperienced Ruairi Robinson a while back.

Even being a big fan of the original anime, I'm still very excited to one day see this. Word is that it may get a huge budget, which I think is the first step in the right direction, considering they really need to make this pretty epic to live up to the anime. Now if Fergus and Ostby's script turns out pretty great, they just need to find a director who can take all their writing and turn it into an excellent movie. Anyone still excited?

Nope. Yet another "lets Americanise it" bullshit. The reason why the Akira manga (which the film is supposedly going to be based upon) was so damn good (not a big fan of the anime film) was because it was set around a post apocalyptic cyberpunk world set in Neo Tokyo, against a certainly amazing backdrop and a commentary on nuclear weapons by a Japanese, written for the Japanese, set in Japan. See where I'm going with this? To move it into "Neo Manhattan" not only takes away the fundamental reasons why it worked in the first place, but also shits on the story too. The likes of Tetsuo and Kaneda are going to have their names to shit like "Tom" and "Ken". Fuck no, just fuck no. I've not been this genuinely pissed off about a film for some time now...phwoar, Hollywood couldn't balls it up anymore, could they? To America it'll be yet another "superhero" slash "blockbuster" movie that shall be forgotten, but to me, the story is too good to condense to such an abomination. Fuck Hollywood and their close minded racism. Fuck 'em.

[KiBa]

Oh, my fuck... This again... Holy shit. You Euro trash Asian worshiping American-haters are really starting to piss me off.

Get your own Hollywood to shit on.

Ever seen Japanese-ized remakes of American movies? Happens all the time, but you never call all those St. Jap-sans "close-minded racists." Since when is it racist to re-imagine a story to fit your own people, for your own people!?

P. fuckingggg S.

The Empire of Japan deserved to be nuked. Screw their "commentaries." There is no case of denial in history that compares with that of the Japanese people concerning WWII. Barbarous, suicidal monsters complain about American methods? They started the war because they were arrogant and fundamentally corrupt. We rightly chose to save hundreds of thousands of American lives by dropping those bombs. I don't like it. Nobody likes it. But this is the real world, and a handful of Japanese FANATICS made it an inevitability.

P.P.S.

Tom and Ken are not shit names. They're good Western names. Tetsuo and Kaneda cannot even be pronounced properly in English, so there is absolutely no reason to fall all over yourselves trying to grovel at the feet of the Japanese, trying to impress them with your "open-mindedness" and "respect for their superior culture." Go ahead. Keep feeding into the anti-Western sentiment that has spread throughout the world. Betray your blood and culture, you cowardly worms. These foreigners laugh at our idiotic "tolerance," which, as Aristotle said, is the last "virtue" of a dying civilization. You make me sick.

It's one thing to love Shenmue. It's quite another to constantly put down your own people and put any and all foreigners on an ever rising pedestal. I spit on you. Know that I hate ever bloody thing you stand for.

Bah! To hell with you! Traitors! Weaklings! Lilliputians!

My country is the last vestige of Western civilization on Earth. Watch as the People rise again in this time of darkness to exorcise the demon of socialism (a European disease) from these shores forever!

Long live the American Republic and death to all her enemies!!!

[Henry Spencer]

Nice.

[Bluecast]

I am in the minority here but I hated Akira,it was one of the most boring and IMO overrated Anime's I ever saw.

Giant cancer ball boy.

[Kenny]

I liked Akira for the high quality, state of the art animation.

Which is what this won't have.

[Henry Spencer]

I am in the minority here but I hated Akira,it was one of the most boring and IMO overrated Anime's I ever saw.

Giant cancer ball boy.

Yeah well, like I said, it wasn't the anime I care about (since I wasn't that big a fan of it) it's the manga books.

[Bluecast]

Kiba you have such a talent as a comedian and a writer.

Go use this energy in writing comedic books and make some cash,seriously.

[Martin]

I'll probably steal the film from somewhere, at some point. I'm a big fan of the anime, so I'm interested to see how this'll turn out. I'm convinced it'll be really shit.

[Axm]

Concept art from the 2009 version has surfaced which would have starred Chris Evans and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

[CodingGenesis]

Those bikes remind me of extreme-G. Especially the red one bears a striking resemblance with extreme-G bikes.

[Axm]

Dope art

[OL]

For what they are, those pics are actually pretty cool. And the storyboards show that they were actually trying to make it something pretty damn close to the original. Never even knew Chris Evans and Joseph Gordon Levitt were attached to the project, but you could do worse for casting. Both are actors I really like, even if they are way too old for the roles.

Either way, I still say Akira really shouldn't be anything other than Japanese. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but because the core ideas of the story are all incredibly Japanese in nature, and chances are really damn good that a western adaptation would miss the point entirely.
It's kind of like when Hollywood swiped Infernal Affairs and turned it into The Departed. I hated The Departed because it completely abandoned the message of the original. It took the basic shell of the story, ran through the major plot points, but in the process completely forgot that the original film was expressing a parallel to Avici, a level of Buddhist Hell built on the idea of constant suffering. By losing sight of that parallel (and by killing a character that actually lives in the original), The Departed ended up as a completely meaningless crime story. I'm fucking shocked that so many people loved the hell out of it. It didn't even retain the glossy, cool-as-ice style of the original, instead opting for a bunch of constantly angry Bostonians yelling "fuck" at eachother.
I don't think a US version of Akira would far quite so badly on the aesthetic level, but the deeper stuff would be lost entirely.

[Riku Rose]

Either way, I still say Akira really shouldn't be anything other than Japanese. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but because the core ideas of the story are all incredibly Japanese in nature, and chances are really damn good that a western adaptation would miss the point entirely.

Apparently when Gary Whitta (Book of Eli, Walking Dead Game and New Star Wars spin off) was writing it they had it set in a Japan owned New York.

WHITTA: I’ll give you a little something that’s actually never been spoken about before. How interesting it is, I’ll let you decide. But we always dealt with the problem of, [and] I think what a lot of the fans felt was problematic, was the westernization of it; [it’s like] “they’re never going to make the $100 million movie with an all-Japanese cast. You need to westernize it.” And that almost became kind of a joke—like, the idea of Shia LaBeouf as Tetsuo or whatever. People are going to have a hard time with that, and certainly the fans.

So we came up with an idea that I actually thought was really cool; I don’t know if it survived into future versions. It’s not New Manhattan—because that was the [initial] idea, right? They moved it in to New Manhattan. I said, it’s not New Manhattan, it’s still New Tokyo but—this is going to sound weird—it’s actually in Manhattan. What we did was, the idea is that there’d been a massive economic crash in the United States and in our desperation, we sold Manhattan Island to the Japanese, who were becoming a very powerful economic force, and they were having an overpopulation problem, because Japan is a series of islands, it can only accommodate so many people. So they just bought Manhattan Island, and it became the fifth island of Japan, and they populated it. It became New Tokyo, and it was just off the coast of the United States. So it was Japanese territory, it wasn’t New Tokyo, but there were Americans who kind of lived in little Americanized quarters of it. I felt it was a way to do a kind of cool Western-Eastern fusion of the two ideas; not fully Japanese, not fully westernized. Whether or not you’ll ever see that version, I don’t know, but I thought that was kind of a cool solution to that problem of westernization of a Japanese concept.

[Kenny]

That's an interesting idea but it doesn't help justify casting white people in the core roles and naming them Tetsuo and Kaneda. Only way that would work is if in that society, the majority race is Japanese and to help assimilate into it more people change their names to sound more Japanese (like how easterners adopt Western names in order to fit into Western society more). It'd still be weird though but that's the only justification I can think of that makes sense.

The concept art is great especially if they reach 2012's Total Recall quality. If JGL was meant to be Tetsuo that would've been pretty cool. I don't know if an Akira movie is even needed though, what more can be said in an adaptation like that unless they intended to reference the phone book sized Mangas more. Still, I find nothing wrong with different interpretations of the samework. There are Japanese versions of Star Wars, Powerpuff girls, Witchblade, and more.

[Raithos]

As a fan I would love to have seen the final product for sure, even though I don't usually like remakes. But since this was a little different going from magna/anime to the big screen, would have been cool regardless of where it came from.

There are Japanese versions of Star Wars