Results tagged “Katsuhiro Otomo”

AICN Anime has news about Live Action Akira by The Hughes Brothers.

New York's Vulture blog has learned that Warner Bros. to sign the Hughes brothers (From Hell, Dead Presidents, Menace II Society) to direct a live-action remake of the cult favorite Akira, from a script by Iron Man scribes Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby.

Ten to one Les Freres Hughes were signed on based on The Book of Eli. Let's see if a movie actually comes from this deal.

The same article has a poster — and an awesome-looking one, too — for the live-action Space Battleship Yamato film.

This whole business about a live-action Akira has started to feel entirely too much like the continued attempts to make a live-action Dune. Jodorowsky, David Lynch, and John Harrison each had their way with the material, resulting in two attempts that failed and succeeded in entirely different ways and one non-attempt that has gained mythic status as the Greatest SF Movie Never Made.

Akira's becoming a lot like that: it's more interesting as an idea at this point than as a completed project. For decades now, people have been lining up to throw themselves at the project only to go splat against it. The lucky director who manages to do that and make a good movie out of it gets a hell of a nerd-cred feather to stick into his cap ... and the studio that backed it might get to make some decent bank, too. Heck, we're getting to the point now where some of the people calling the shots in those places might well have copies of Akira on their own shelves at home, but that doesn't mean they're automatically going to spend $175-$250 million on it.

My biggest reason for being hesitant about a Western live-action remake of Akira is simple: it's a story that is deeply bound up in its setting. Inextricably so. You cannot move a story like this to, say, Manhattan (as was the premise in one of the more recent versions of the script) and also port over all the subtext that made the story what it is. Granted, most of the non-fans may never know the difference, but it's exactly the kind of misstep that causes projects like this to break from the inside and become mere curiosities instead of breakout/crossover hits. Non-fans watch it and sense something is missing, but can't put their finger on it — like a cover version of a song where every third measure went missing.

And of course no Western studio is going to throw gobs of money at something that isn't — well, Western. Unless you're talking about a glossy period-piece soap opera like Memoirs of a Geisha or The Last Samurai, both of which had at least some degree of built-in U.S.-based box-office star appeal or name recognition. Or unless it's Blood: The Last Vampire, which was actually an English-language Hong Kong coproduction and didn't cost very much to begin with.

If we're going to have live-action anime, the least we could do is start with stories where the venue isn't Japan in the first place. It's not like we have any shortage of such things: Claymore, Vampire Hunter D (which I hear is actually in progress now), Black Lagoon, Monster, Detroit Metal City (why not?). Even Guin Saga or Berserk, as long as you don't care about making back a dime of your $200+M investment ... although I'd place my poker chips on Guin making back at least some of that money.

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For most of us, it’s Akira the anime, not Akira the manga. Some of that can be chalked up to logistics and finances: Wouldn’t you rather rent a two-hour movie, instead of spending upwards of $125 for six volumes of manga which have not been all that reliably available in the first place? Yeah, so would I — especially if it means getting substantially the same story and being just as confused (boggled, mind-blown) by it.

Well, you now have one less excuse. The rights to Akira in English have reverted from Dark Horse back to Kodansha, and the Big K has since set up its own publishing arm in the U.S. Ghost in the Shell and several other Masamune Shirow titles are among the first titles in the new catalog. And, of course, Akira — since a world of manga and anime without Akira is a little like a diner that doesn’t serve hamburgers or milkshakes.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

Some tidbits from this week's AICN Anime column:

Bloody Disgusting is reporting director Takashi Shimizu (The Grudge franchise, The Shock Labyrinth 3D) will be producing a feature film adaptation of Satoshi Kon's TV series Paranoia Agent.

Paranoia Agent is about as good as this sort of thing gets, so sign me right up — I'm a little iffy about Shimizu on board but at least they got someone with major credits to their name.

... About.com:manga on Tokyopop's movie plans, including vampire manga Lament Of The Lamb - on which Stu Levy says "The plan is now to have it directed by myself and a great Japanese director, Takahiko Akiyama, who directed a film called Hinokio.

Lamb was created by Kurogane artist and author Kei Toume, who has a lot of work not translated into English yet. If they can preserve some of the melancholy, elegiac spirit that Toume put onto the page ...

... Masahiro Minami, producer on Studio BONES’ chambara epic Sword of the Stranger, and alumnus of Sunrise Studio, will be serving as a “creative manager” in the upcoming 20th Century Fox adaptation of Cowboy Bebop. 

Another adaptation I can't see anything good coming from, if only because it's such a huge, risky job. I know that sounds paradoxical, but maybe it would have been better for them to pick something more modest first and cut their teeth on that before attempting something this ... well, colossal in fan's minds.

... Masaki Segawa (Basilisk) will adapt another Futaro Yamada ninja novel, named Kunoichi Kôkihei, starting in Gekkan Young Magazine # 02 (On Sale January 9).

You don't need to convince me to check this one out.

.... Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira creator) and Shinji Kimura's (veteran anime background artist, Genius Party: Deathic 5) picture book Hipira: The Little Vampire (Hipira-kun) will be adapted into a televised anime miniseries. The anime will run for five consecutive days within the BS Fuyu Yasumi Anime Tokusen program on the NHK BS2 satellite/cable channel.

Friends of mine at AnimeFest surprised me with a signed copy of Hipira (thank you, Janice!), and so seeing this one come to life is a real left-field delight.

Dark Horizons | News | Gary Whitta Talks "Akira" Remake - December 13th 2009

"I haven't worked on it for about a year ... We were going to adapt the whole six-episode graphic novel" says Whitta.

He adds that he got notes from Otomo while working on the script, but his work "was very, very preliminary. We did a couple of drafts of the script but, when I was there at least, it never got wrapped up to the point where I think he would get really hands on."

Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby now have scripting duties on the project...

I haven't been holding my breath for this one. Not least of all because the animated film really was everything a project like this needed to be, and any Western remake just promises to be too far removed from the original to be worth the same name.

A big part of what made the original work was its origins, setting and milieu — what it evoked, and where it evoked it from. You can't just move that arbitrarily to "New New York" or something of that ilk without losing a lot. Maybe their idea was to have a kind of post-9/11 NYC vibe as a substitute for the neo-Hiroshima disaster in the original story, but the two aren't interchangeable.

I'm in the middle of reading the newly-republished edition of the original manga — look for a full writeup on that soon-ish. Rereading it reminded me of just how jaundiced a view the story has of humanity — that no species so preoccupied with status, petty territorial disputes and other egomania deserves to evolve into anything better. Which, now that I think about it, isn't all that outlandish.

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Harmagedon is an endearing combination of massive ambitions and goofy end results. It’s grand in scope, full of wonder, and thoroughly over-the-top, all of which are things I can admire on the right day. To some people it’ll come off as an animated version of an epic science-fiction novel written by a high-school kid during study hall, but in a weird way that was exactly what I liked about it. I admire movies that are bold, that stick their necks out and run the risk of looking foolish. Sometimes they fall flat on their face; sometimes they achieve greatness; and sometimes, even more rarely, they wind up doing both at the same time.

Genma Taisen, the movie’s Japanese surtitle, translates as The Great War Against Genma — Genma being a demonic creature that is slowly destroying the whole universe (something like the Nothing from The NeverEnding Story). His — its — swath of destruction is now endangering Earth itself, its inhabitant blissfully ignorant of the devastation to come. Well, except for Princess Luna of Transylvania, the “esper” who is awakened to the danger Genma poses when an asteroid obliterates her transatlantic jet. Hovering between life and death, she comes into contact with a kind of cosmic consciousness that implores her to find others like her across the world and defend her world from destruction.

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I am writing this review from the relative safety of my house, while half a world away a whole swath of countries are convulsing with violence. Small wonder some people look to total destruction for answers to difficult problems. If we wipe the whole slate clean, maybe something better will emerge, and our enemies — whoever they are — will be decimated. Of course, the logic of mutually assured destruction guarantees that we will never be certain.

Few societies are as fit to speak on the subject of Armageddon as Japan, given that they lived through their own microcosmic version of it at the end of World War II. They have a cultural perspective on mass destruction that few others do, and they have introjected it into their popular culture in ways that could be seen as either strikingly self-analytical or downright fetishistic.

Akira is not the only animated Japanese production to deal with the subject of holocaust — the X-rated Legend of the Overfiend, of all things, also comes to mind — but it may certainly be the best of them. Even after Ghost in the Shell and Jin-roh and Princess Mononoke have all been accounted for, Akira still ranks as one of the single finest animated productions from Japan and certainly one of the finest anywhere. There are other movies with better plotting or more absorbing stories, but for sheer spectacle there was never anything like it, not even in the ranks of Disney, and it broke new technical ground in terms of how far animation could be pushed. If anything, it is even more of a nightmare vision now than it was when it first appeared in 1987, with its images of cities being leveled and civilizations laid to waste.