Akira is one of my favourite animated films of all time. Scratch that, it’s probably one of my favourite FILMS of all time. Visually stunning, with a sense of sophistication you rarely see in cinema, Akira is devastating in it’s brilliance.

Produced in the days prior to CG, the film was years in the making with EVERY SINGLE cell hand drawn. To me you just can’t match that - knowing that it’s been physically touched by human hands makes it feel all the more real.

Don’t get me wrong, I think CGI is wonderful, but there’s still a part of me that prefers the old-school Star Wars puppetry and model effects as opposed to the rampant pixelation of the prequels.

Translating the film - itself based on Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s manga - to live-action and doing it well will be seriously tricky. According to Bloody-Disgusting the job of bringing it to the silver screen falls to Oscar nominated short film director Ruairi Robinson.

Warner Bros, who set the project up with writer director Stephen Norrington, writer James Robinson and producer Jon Peters in 2003, are hoping to get Akira made as a pre-strike movie (good luck with that!).

Norrington was scarred away from directing ever again by Sean Connery on The League of Extraordinary Gentleman and Jon Peters has a reputation for being highly incompetent (it took him a decade to get a Superman movie made, and it only happened after the studio marginalised his role) so I’m not surprised the movie never happened back then.

Robinson is an interesting choice, he is vastly inexperienced, but his short film The Silent City can be seen at B-D and after watching it, I’ve still not been able to scrape my jaw from the floor. Neil Blomkamp this guy isn’t. The Silent City has just the type of intensity I’d want from an Akira live-action film.

Akira is kind of like Watchmen, it’s something that obviously won’t be able to live up to the original (and I seriously think Snyder is a poor choice for that film) but you just keep your fingers crossed and hope for the best. I’m cautiously optimistic.

source - bloody-disgusting

Categories: Movie News, Sci-Fi