It's been 35 years since the original Akira anime feature film made its debut. The Akira film has stood the test of time and is still considered as one of the best anime films of all-time.
After all these years, Akira is still in the news. From the
35th anniversary Blu-Ray/DVD release to
finding a director for Hollywood's live action adaptation and
Katsuhiro Otomo's own thoughts on upcoming feature film, its a great time to be an Akira fan. Hollywood's adaptation has been met with a bunch of resentment from fans, especially since the
live action Ghost in the Shell didn't live up to what the fans wanted.
Over the years, Katsuhiro Otomo has distanced himself from Akira. He still very busy at 63 creating and drawing. Recently, he was asked by
Forbes Magazine about what he thought after he saw this finished Akira film. It turns out he thought it was a utter failure. Why would the creator dislike the adaptation so much? He felt that it didn't do his original work justice and took away from the original story. Here is what his response was to Forbes' question.
"
Actually, when I saw the first rush of the movie version of Akira I thought it would be a failure. I left the theater very quickly and came back home to tell my wife that the movie was a failure. This was because I thought the first half was good but because the time and budget was limited, with so many cuts, the quality dropped as the story developed. In general, I thought the picture quality and cut quality went down when the movie went into the latter half. So when I saw the movie's quality decline as I watched it made me feel miserable."
It's a good thing everything worked out in the end and with the live action adaptation coming soon, it will be interesting to see what he has to say after its release.
About Akira:
Neo-Tokyo is about to E X P L O D E!
Akira isn’t just a movie – it’s the genesis of a genre. Katsuhiro Otomo’s landmark cyberpunk classic obliterated the boundaries of Japanese animation and forced the world to look into the future. Akira’s arrival shattered traditional thinking, creating space for movies like the The Matrix to be dreamed into brutal reality. Without Kaneda and Tetsuo, without espers and psionic assassins, without that badass motorcycle – our world would be a far less exciting place to exist. But the manga became the movie and the movie became a phenomenon and the world took notice. Now, Akira is everywhere. If you can’t see it in the streets – if you can’t feel it crawling around inside your brain – then you have yet to be initiated. What. Are. You. Waiting. For