Akira Might Get Re-Written By Dark Knight Scribe

[Zom-B]

...and maybe I'll be able to watch something called Akira and not sit there with that Jackie Chan rage comic look on my face at the end.

Why? Why would you want to do that? Given that...

Yes, I watched Akira, and had no fucking clue what the shit happened. ~blablabla~.....THE FUCK!?

snip

I just want to start out by saying that I love Akira.

To be fair to Reaper, the biggest issue with the anime was that they tried to condense the source material into a short movie. The subtleties and symbolism, while present were a lot harder to work into a small window.

If you want the story, read the manga. The best part about the Akira movie was the ridiculously good quality of the animation work for the time.

CAPTCHA: delidan implementa. Sounds like a Harry Potter spell.

You hit the nail on the head. Akira the anime is like trying to condense The Lord of the Rings into one Ralph Bakshi movie. It just doesn't work, but for what it is, it's fucking awesome.

 

[gphjr14]

Let it die, let it die, let it die, let it die....

Can't they see that nobody wants this?

Reaper195 wants it, then again he also thought the Dragon Ball movie was decent.

 

[tendo82]

I actually think the Akira animated movie is far better than the manga. Yeah the manga is more expansive, but it starts to lose serious steam after Neo Tokyo's apocalypse. It's best feature is portraying society on the eve of catastrophe, and the anime focuses almost exclusively on that. Once everything becomes a huge crater and the general somehow turns into a hero, I pretty much lost interest.

Also I think the impressionistic nature of the anime's plotting makes it a quintessentially Japanese creation.

 

[tahrey]

To be fair to Reaper, the biggest issue with the anime was that they tried to condense the source material into a short movie. The subtleties and symbolism, while present were a lot harder to work into a small window.

If you want the story, read the manga. The best part about the Akira movie was the ridiculously good quality of the animation work for the time.

You hit the nail on the head. Akira the anime is like trying to condense The Lord of the Rings into one Ralph Bakshi movie. It just doesn't work, but for what it is, it's fucking awesome.

Eh, I did credit that bit as not being the easiest to follow, but the rest of it wasn't exactly so difficult... ;-)

The real-world history of it all is quite literally that they started to run out of cash, thanks in part to the quality of the animation (trying to evoke the quite stunning levels of detail and quality of linework in the manga) and the choice was between patching it up as best as possible and getting some money back out of it, or go bankrupt with nothing but a three-quarters finished, unreleased movie to show for it. I'm led to believe it happens quite a bit in the anime universe - Studio Ghibli, for one, have had to tweak their films before because of it. Nausicaa definitely suffered this effect, and if Howl's Moving Castle and Ponyo didn't then I'd be very much surprised - they pretty much hit the climactic moment and immediately drop dead, even more starkly than Miyazaki's other typically denoument-lite works... as if someone was standing there with one eye on the budget and one on the completed keyframes, and blew a whistle as soon as the final one of the latter dealing with the main story was completed, leaving just enough of the former to pay for tweening, grading and printing.

ANYWAY
I had forgotten, so thanks for the reminder - first I heard of the Akira reboot, before the whole thing turned dreadfully sour, was that it was going to be made in two parts, Harry Potter 7 style. It doesn't quite have the epic length of LOTR (and certainly not the 6-disc, all-day marathon of the directors' cut), but splitting it into a couple of 2-and-a-bit hour films (probably with Tetsuo's first attempt to E.X.P.L.O.D.E the city being the end-of-part-1 cliffhanger) would definitely give the story a lot more room to breathe. Once the decision was made to cut it down to a single parter, it became a whole lot harder to save... I mean, if you're taking something whose first incarnation started well funded but ended up sucking the budget more than dry, but you're STARTING production on your version from a position of having no cash to spare... it's probably not a good idea. Quality will suffer. Your attempted "better than the real thing" reboot will fail its POST.

 

[xplosive59]

Ok, I LOVE the original film (have not read the manga but I am looking to purchase it at the moment) and this might not be as bad as percieved, only if they set it in Japan! If it is some westernized bullshit where its set in New York or something I am not gonna go see it.

 

[Kimarous]

No matter who writes the script, the big question is whether it ends up like this...

 

[Lord Beautiful]

eh... great as the new Batman films are, the dialogue is pretty atrocious in places. The Dark Knight was great because of Nolan's direction and Ledger's acting, in my opinion. I don't think Nolan's made a film withgenuinely good dialogue since Memento. He's simply been able to make brilliant films despite the fact his characters to nothing but exposit at each other, and occasionally crack humourless jokes.

I can just imagine an Akira re-make as written by the Nolans:

Kei: I don't understand. Why did Tetsuo have to go?

Kaneda: Because he's the godlike sociopath Neo-Tokyo deserves, but not the one it needs. He's a silent psycho. A watchful demigod. A dark mentally-unhinged-but-we're-still-trying-to-portray-him-as-a-hero knight.

Thank you for that.

I mean it.

No sarcasm.

OP: There's no way either of those writers (especially the latter) could come up with a suitable Akira script. The original movie is still good, and the English dub with Johnny Yong Bosch is good enough to turn off the subtitles. Enough of this, Hollywood.