Editorials > On a live-action Akira

The Inter-tubes lit on fire yesterday when reports came from Bloody-Disguisting that Warner Brothers is moving ahead with a live-action version of Katsuhiro Otomo's anime/manga Akira. 

BD claimed that Irish director Ruari Robinson is attached as the director, but also they'd like to see the adaptation as a pre-strike production. And that's fine. But over at SciFi Scanner, John "Table Of Malcontents/Kotaku/Destructoid/Ectomo/If you blog it he will come" Brownlee lets us in on a fun fact: he and Robinson used to be roommates! From SciFi Scanner:

Fascinating. I can't confirm or deny whether he's been hired to work on Akira (I have no idea), I did have an interesting (and completely abstract) conversation with him the night before I moved from Dublin to Berlin about whether a live-action remake of a story as sprawling, surreal and decidedly Japanese as Akira could work as a live-action remake.

His feeling, as I recall, was that the setting could still work, but there'd be a necessity to move it to America to please studios. His idea was that a Neo-New York that had been culturally swamped by Japanese immigrants in a post-globalized future could take the place of Neo-Tokyo. In short, something like Blade Runner's futuristic vision of Los Angeles.

The other thing that he said that was interesting was that he didn't think Akira could be filmed as a single two-hour movie: the anime had tried that and failed to really convey an understandable plot. An Akira movie would need to be a Kill Bill style two-parter.

   Well, I'd assume they'd Americanize Akira in some way, but Neo New York sounds like a Futurama joke in the making. Wait, I think they did make it. Now, the idea one would release a two-part film is highly enjoyable, but realistically WB would never sign on with it. After the proven mess that was Grindhouse–and the fact that Kill Bill was successful only thanks to Tarantino's name and genre thieving–a live-action remake of a massive-volume manga and historic anime would never fly for an American audience, even one that has accepted Otomo's film.

   The landscape is definitely changed since the first time Neo Tokyo was set to E-X-P-L-O-D-E, but there's no way to do it. It's like the adaptation of Robotech–also being backed by WB, funny enough: it is a bad idea to mess with nostalgia, especially when using it as a cash cow. Has the memory of Transformers or 300 already faded from your minds?