Has the Last Airbender taught you nothing?

Seriously I was at work when this caught my eye. Almost lost my lunch over this news. News over the Akira movie.

http://movies.ign.com/articles/115/1156981p1.html

I just waiting until they start using transparent actors since there is nothing more white than transparent actors.

Hollywood doesn't believe that the North American public at large would see a movie in mass that has an Asian leading man and set in a futuristic Tokyo. Therefore they translated the location from Neotokyo to New Manhattan and the cast from Japanese to pretty white boys.

And now to sit back and wait for the news that they're doing the exact same thing to the Ghost in the Shell movie.



Also, I'm not an Akira fan, having never seen it, but I will boycott the movie on principle if Robert Pattinson gets any parts in the movie.

Kinda old news. I remember when Leonardo DiCaprio was gonna play Kaneda with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Tetsuo. Since I believe DiCaprio's Appian Way production company is still producing the Akira Movie for Warner Brothers, I guess this means that he decided other actors should take the roles.

Thing is, I kind of don't mind as long as the movie is good. The least of the problems with the Last Airbender was the choice of casting; it was just a dreadful film. The problem is that if take the name of a popular property and "remake" it completely differently then you inevitably upset all the fans of the original, but they obviously figure it's worth doing to have the name of the original attached (which seems stupid as the only people who will want to see it because of the name are the same fans you've alienated with all your changes).

Take The Italian Job; the remake a few years back was a fairly entertaining caper film, but because they tried to pretend it was a remake of the original Italian Job, but made sweeping changes to just about everything, it greatly lowered my opinion of it.

I don't trust Hollywood to do the movie right. They could cast a super intelligent strain of broccolli and my expectations couldn't be lower. I truly believe this movie will be horrible regardless of who they cast, so it might as well be a big name star.

my response...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tim5nU3DwIE

"No time to talk, guys! Evil scientists and wrinkly children and flying chairs are holding our friend Tetuso captive and performing experiments on him ... and the prom's tomorrow!"

(That's probably a familiar video by now, but then again, this news keeps cropping up, like weeds in development.)

And here I was thinking the bad news was that they were actually going to make a live action Akira movie, which is a mistake.

I'm not a huge fan of the original, but I do understand its appeal to its fanbase. This is not something that will translate well to a live action film. It just won't.

Of course, casting an emo, causcasion prettyboy as Tetsuo would be a colossal failure.

So....does this mean they are gonna change the name of the movie to Joe or Jimmy, or something like that? :P

Get over it. The story is not steeped in pesudo Asian history like Airbender. Americanizing Akira is no different than Americanizing The Ring. The movie will suck or be good on its own merits. NOT because white people are playing the parts

Eh, if Kanye West can do it, why can't they?

Hell I didnt care about the casting of Air Bender either, while steeped in Asian mythology it wasnt distinctly Asian. The characters had as many generic caucasian traits as they did asian so that was never an issue to me.

Heck Uncle Iroh could have been played by a black man as long as they retianed the flavor and feel of the character.

Air Bender was done in not by the so called white wash of it cast but because the cast members chosen and the director butchered what should have been a relkatively simplistic conversion from animated ot live action.

And this will be the same. as long as the director and actors capture the flavor and feel of the characters and the movie, It will be fine. If they butcher the scenes and direction with exess this or that, itll be atrocious and rightly deserve whatever scorn it gets.

I have never been keen on the idea of any anime being converted to live action movies either due to:

1. Weak budget
2. Weak FX
3. Ignorance of the property they are converting either on the part of the producer, director, cast, sponsors or all of the above.

Remember the live action Street Fighter movie with Van Damme? Putrid.

Remember the live action Fist of the North Star? YUCK.

Remember the live action Dragon Ball Z movie? ICK

I shudder to think what will become of AKIRA, I have minimal hope for the live action Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop movies also.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

But sadly in spite of itself, The Last Airbender was still one of the top 20 grossing films last year and grossed $320 million worldwide.

The problem with translating comic or animation to live action is what is very easy to do, have fantastic worlds, impossible effects, etc. is costly to do in live action. The more different a comic or animated world is from ours, the costlier it becomes to make "real". The majority of superhero films are "easy" to translate. Take the world outside your window and add a guy in spandex/leather/power suit and give him someone/thing to fight. However the more different the world is from ours, then corners start to get cut and with that some or most of the uniqueness of the setting.

So can you have rampaging motorcycle riding youth tooling through a destroyed Manhattan like some American Mad Max film. That's going to cost a pretty penny. How about Tetsuo's monstrous transformation? I have a feeling that if this honestly moves forward we will end up with cuts like the missing giant mutant psychic squid from Watchmen. They will compromise too much of the original setting so even on the surface, ignoring the Japan to US shift of location, to still be Akira.