Has the Last Airbender taught you nothing?

By the title alone, the only person that needs to be Japanese is Akira.

"Joooooe!"
"Rallllllph!"
"Jooooooooooe!"
"Ralllllllllph!"
"Jooooooooooooooe!"
"Ralllllllllllph!"
*orbital cannon finally shuts them both up*

The hack producers can get around this by having their "Akira" be Japanese-American or, better still, a lovable tow-headed, freckle-faced rascal adopted by Japanese-American parents.

sad thing out of those 3? Dragonball turned a decent profit and I'm pretty sure we all know it's because of pure nostalgia.

The Trekkies are gonna be pissed when they find out.

I always loved that ship design. It's awesome.

And here's my response... This!


I think mine has a better grasp of the situation heh.

Don't forget the Guyver movies.

Crying Freeman - 1995

Gundam Saviour - 2000

Also, there was a little-known adaptation of Speed Racer years and years ago.

Hollywood must be terrified of coming up with ideas of their own.

That's funny because Shatner was fairly well known as a Shakespearean actor before Star Trek.

I pretty much try to ignore Hollywood (that way, I'm pleasantly surprised when they make something good) but the Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop movies and the Short Circuit remake are three things that could cause me to start a riot if they suck.

Never read the manga but please tell me what themes in Akira are so steeped in being Japanese that they cannot successfuly be translated to an Americanized idea. Not trying to start a fight, i'm genuinely interested. I just don't see any life themes that can't be translated across various peoples.

The first live action Guyver movie is best forgotten. I mean seriously when you have J.J. from Good Times starring as a rapping Zoanoid, the movie just screams epic failure.


The second one was vastly better and actually watchable......when nothing else is on.

To be honest with CGI tech nowadays the Guyver is something I wouldn't mind seeing done, provided that it's done right. Make the Chronos (Kronos?) Corporation the global threat that it is, get some good dialog and cast and get the Guyver into the action.

For the most part the plot of Guyver is pretty straightforward, transform and fight the Zoanoids and stop Chronos. Throw in the alien origins and you could get a pretty good movie out of it.

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

And at least the second movie didn't have Jimmie Walker as a rapping Zoanoid....

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

The manga is a masterpiece that the movie, awesome as it is, can only echo faintly. It's well worth the investment.

Just to grab something from the headlines to start with, consider earthquakes. It's quite something to see Otomo's detailed artwork juxtaposed to the photographs coming after the Sendai quake - one would think he'd been drawing with those as his models. (Also consider the blank, inscrutable, yet incomprehensibly powerful Akira as a metaphor for the force of nature.) New York City has never and will never experience an earthquake like that, but such an event is something that people in Japan simply have learned to live with.

If I were adapting Akira for a US setting, the logical place would be Los Angeles, which has not only an impressive skyline surrounded by urban sprawl, but also a vulnerability to earthquakes. Los Angeles also has the advantage of tapping into West Coast biker culture for an analog for Kaneda's, something that New York City just doesn't have to the same degree.

But that's just a couple of examples off the top of my head. A truly successful adaptation would also have to find analogs for the firebombing/a-bombing during WWII, Unit 731, urban overcrowding, social friction along class lines, the generation gap, superpower conflict, authoritarianism, educational systems, etc. It's a daunting task that, bluntly, the Hughes Brothers aren't up to. The last time they took on a graphic novel with multiple complex themes, Alan Moore's From Hell, they turned it into a standard-issue serial killer thriller, performed in period dress and with bad accents.

Incidentally, a further problem with this adaptation's direction is the age group of the actors they're trying to cast for roles that were originally teenagers: Joaquin Phoenix (age 36), Michael Fassbender (33), James McAvoy (32), Chris Pine (30), Justin Timberlake (30), and Andrew Garfield (28). Whatever the acting abilities of these guys, none of them will be able to convincingly portray on screen characters who are somewhere between 15 and 17 despite adolescent rebellion and self-discovery being the key themes of Akira.

Which boils down to say that there's a lot more to Akira than futuristic motor bikes, psychic powers, body horror, and orbital lazzors, which is probably all that this Americanized version will get, assuming it ever makes its way out of development hell.

Honestly, I'm exasperated with Hollywood constantly treating adaptations as the excuse to stick a familiar title on whatever hackwork they can commission on the cheap as long as they can attach marquee-friendly names to it.

The movie is as much about fear of nuclear bombs and cancer as anything else. Look at what Akira turns into and tell me that's not an analog to a tumor. Plus the imagery of the nuclear explosion, the burns and bandages... it's pretty much all right there.

That video linked earlier is right: the American version will be about Nikes and Doritos.

Decent adaptations of Japanese films have been made (Seven Samurai -> Magnificent Seven, Hidden Fortress -> Star Wars, Ringu -> The Ring, Yojimbo -> A Fistful of Dollars), but this won't be one of them.

Los Angeles has never had an impressive skyline.

That's definitely one of the themes at work in Akira, which originated during the Reagan phase of the Cold War (n.b. the "Star Wars" SDI's space-based lasers). Finding a contemporary analog for that will be tricky. Even the current post-quake nuclear crisis in Japan isn't on the same scale.

Those are all good adaptations, but even the best had to lose a great deal to work. The Seven Samurai, for example, is a tremendously rich film that manages to comment on both feudal and post-war Japan, while the highly entertaining Magnificent Seven doesn't have nearly as much to say about the American West or the post-war United States.

(Fun fact: Yojimbo was an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novels Red Harvest and The Glass Key, both of which were made into movies, neither of which are as good as Yojimbo or Fistful of Dollars.)
LA's combination of skyscrapers and sprawl was certainly impressive enough to be updated for Blade Runner. The Akira remake could do worse than rip that off.

To approach Akira from another angle, Kaneda and Tetsuo are clearly low-class punks. (I wish I read Japanese and could confirm exactly how low down they are on the culture's hierarchy, though I'm pretty sure they're not burakumin, the rough equivalent "untouchables"). At the very least, they're presented as working-class delinquents being shuttled through an educational system that's only a temporary holding pen, dead-end kids with no prospects for the future. While the US doesn't have a comparable class system, race is a sufficiently analogous issue, and recasting Kaneda and Tetuso as inner-city gangbangers wouldn't be a stretch for the directors of Menace II Society. There is of course no way that interpretation would entice Hollywood risk a $150M movie, which is at least the budget a live-action Akira would require.

Now that has possibilities. Perhaps they can also remake INFRAMAN

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