Expect them to hire Simon Kinberg, causing the movie to have no plot as a result.
More Buscemi at http://forum.reelsociety.com/Why? What benefit do you gain from an Akira adaptation not being made?
^ If the remake is successful, it will help seed the market for similar films. Thus, if (and only if) we believe that said similar films will have a higher percentage of crap to quality than average, it's to our advantage if this remake isn't made, and other trends are hopped on instead.
Edit: Actually, it's more complicated than that. If it's remade and flops, other trends will definitely be hopped on. If it's not made, it's up in the air what trends will be hopped on. I think if it's not made, there'll be a higher chance that a director who wants to do a faithful adaptation of some other anime will be able to get approval to do so. (I don't believe adaptations are necessarily bad—for instance, I haven't ruled out that the proposed American Death Note movie will be awesome, so long as it avoids the rumored Executive Meddling.)
edited 16th Jan '12 4:16:29 AM by feotakahari
That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something AwfulSomeone on the last page joked about a Hollywood version of One Piece. Yeah, that sounds ridiculous, but if you think about it, manga/anime like that are the targets Hollywood should be aiming for. Think about it: one of the first and most major complaints regarding anime adaptations is the whitewashing of characters (Speed Racer is exempt on the grounds that no one considers it anime). People get pissed off seeing white guys trying to play Asians. So why not cut the middle man and focus on an anime that doesn't center around Asia?
I really just don't see the big deal with changing the setting when you do an adaptation. Sure, if you tried adaptating something like Rurouni Kenshin or Durarara, where the Japanese setting is important to the plot/characters, a setting change would be a sure sign the adaptation's gonna be In Name Only. But I don't see any of that in Akira, so why should anyone care?
^ I don't actually care one way or the other, but Robert Brockway does
, and his argument is reasonable:
Akira takes place in Tokyo, decades after it's been completely devastated and eventually rebuilt. The location wasn't picked at random: That specific setting has great significance to the story, which revolves around the brutal, violently changing forms of its protagonist, Tetsuo. It's a movie that explores what people are, what civilization brings with it, how progress changes us, and why that's not always for the better. But it absolutely has to take place in Tokyo, Japan's most iconic and permanent settlement, otherwise it means nothing. You can't just do a line, close your eyes, spin a globe, stop it with your dick, and expect the story to work just fine wherever it lands, jaded Hollywood producers.
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All that stuff is part of the subtext, though. Subtext always changes when you do an adaptation, no matter how faithful you try to make it.
For example, the Akira anime movie was made while the Soviet Union was still around and the Cold War was still going on. This new movie is being made over two decades after the end of the Cold War. Given that it's a story about a post-nuclear war society, that's gonna result in radically different subtext.
edited 17th Jan '12 3:38:02 AM by RavenWilder
Yeah but you know how you save some of that context? You put the setting in a city that has regular threats from natural disasters and the occasional nuclear reactor such that the threat of city wide destruction still feels present. I'd also avoid putting it in one of the superpowers of the Cold War and put it in a country that hasn't had the nature of its military changed so much. In fact, it would be great if they were close to North Korea and China.
No. Adaptations are made to put things into a different medium, normally being adapted in a direction so that we can see what something would really look like. Most successful film adaptation of another medium- Lord Of The Rings. Was it because they changed the theme? No. It's because I got to see how scary the Eye was and how pretty the Elves were and how fat Sam was. Changing the themes would have pissed people off.
You may be confusing that with remakes. (In which case you are still wrong, the point of those is to make money without forcing the film commissioner to stretch his brains).
Any adaptation of AKIRA which isn't set in Japan, starring Japanese actors (mainly, not exclusively, someone has to play the idiot Americans who get involved near the end of the show), using the same themes of the original manga and anime, and showing a workable version of Neo-Tokyo getting twatted is going to four combustion cycles of a jet engine. It is going to suck, squeeze, bang and blow.
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There's a difference between themes and subtext. The themes of Akira (that I remember, anyway) are society coping with massive disaster(s), urban crime and disorder, teenage gangs/youth culture in conflict with authority, and the government keeping important information from its citizens. Those are all pretty universal themes, and I would hope they'd be in the live action adaptation.
Subtext, however, is what people read into the story beyond what it actually presents us with. You're familiar with Japan's history of suffering and recovering from disasters (natural and otherwise), so when you watch/read a story where Japan suffers and recovers from a disaster, you see it as an analogue for those Real Life disasters. That's fine and dandy, but you have to understand that that's just one interpretation; Akira itself does not make Japan's disaster-ridden history part of the story. Subtext is a subjective and changeable thing, and is not something adaptations should worry about preserving.
And adaptations, even the most faithful ones, do have to change things. Even if the live action film were a shot-for-shot remake of the original, you'd still have the actors reading lines and making facial expressions differently from their hand-drawn counterparts. Sometime you should try watching the two film versions of Jesus Christ Superstar. On paper they should be almost identical: they have the exact same plot, and almost every line of dialogue is unaltered from one version to the next. However, the directors of each film have very different styles and shoot scenes in their own unique ways. On top of that, each actor has their own idea about how to read their lines and what sort of body language to give the characters. Ultimately the two movies end up being quite different from each other despite their near identical scripts; 1973 Pilate and 2000 Pilate are scarcely recognizable as the same character.
P.S. And seeing how respected the Akira anime is despite making huge changes to the manga's plot, I suspect that, if the live action version is well made, the issue of faithfulness will quickly be forgotten. I mean, when's the last time you heard someone complain that a film's depiction of Dracula wasn't faithful to Bram Stoker's novel?
What if Akira was the main character? Cloudcuckoolander here.
edited 30th Jan '12 4:23:49 PM by ConnorBible
I've bitched about "adaptations" of Bram Stoker's Dracula before. If they lack what is needed to make the thing lovely on its own with all the changes then it has nothing and deserves no respect from me.
None.
Thankfully most such things I've come across have a charm to them. Sure Hammer's Dracula is about as similar to the book plotwise as the Universal film - which is to say not at all really - but it's an awesome film on its own. Sadly the Universal film's only pluses are Renfield and Dracula. Unless you watch the Spanish version which actually has a fucking plot.
As for Akira...I'm just a bit confused as to why it's being made. I'm not really angry about it not being in Tokyo, though honestly I would much prefer it being there since Akira is a very Japanese thing in my eyes. I'm just so perplexed as to why this is being made and being set elsewhere that I don't have it in me to be angry. Speed Racer made sense. Dragon Ball Evolution made sense. Akira just doesn't seem like something that would have such mainstream appeal.
If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah

Production has been temporarily shut down cause WB wants to hire a new writer to rework the script.
GUNDAMU GUNDAMU