Over the last couple of years the idea regurgitator that is Hollywood seems to slowly but surely be turning towards anime and manga. The first steps were tentative, cribbing mainly from the shallower end of the pool (the fights and imagery of the Matrix films, the well established toy franchise Transformers), and despite a very mixed reception for Speed Racer and the feelings of dread or disinterest from fans and non-fans respectively surrounding the imminent Dragonball we're now faced with the prospect of a remade Akira.
So far this has me much more interested than many other forthcoming movies. The fact that the advance word hints at two movies, based on the manga rather than the feature length anime, encouraged me to finally read the original in its entirety (in a manner similar to the rush to read Lord of the Rings prior to Peter Jackson's adaptation). I'm very glad that the movie's advance hype triggered my snobbish need to be an advance expert before the potential deluge, because I have the knocked sideways feeling of having read a true masterpiece of the comics medium. I suddenly had a context for Frank Quitely's art, his peculiarly scrunched up faces, his sense of motion, the insane level of background detail, and the sensory overload of the panels that features towards the end of Volume 6. But more than that, I realised that Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 anime was only partially successful and that huge swathes of the story and mythos was left on the cutting room floor. The film ends with the destruction of Neo Tokyo, but the comic goes much further into exploring the world after the apocalypse. For me the emotional heart of the story, the moments of real heroism and the sequences where unexpected alliances are formed all come in Volumes 4-6. The second half also abandons a lot of the conveniently coincidence driven plotting of the first three volumes.
Having read the original I'm convinced that many of the best elements of the story have never seen adaptation. This has me excited for what could be achieved. For starters, I think cinema could really benefit from female characters that look and act like Chiyoko. The themes of religious fanaticism, terrorism, military intervention and fear of children/adolescents are as relevant now as they ever were. Setting the film in a world that is recovering from an economic collapse - in which the Japanese have purchased and rebuilt large areas of America - is also a cannily topical move, gives a basis for Manhattan Island to be rechristened New Tokyo and allows for a mixed Japanese and American cast (which strikes me as an excellent way to incorporate the inevitable Americanisation of the story).
The currently scheduled director Ruairi Robinson seems a good fit to deal with the visual effects, although his short film The Silent City gives next to no sense of how he might handle the story and characters. It's a whole heap of inconsequential, but then that's to be expected for something that only runs for seven minutes. It seems more of a showcase for his technical abilities with a limited budget. However, in Akira Neo Tokyo is a character in its own right, one that changes completely at the halfway point, and it seems that Robinson has as good a chance as anyone of capturing this on film.
The format is also encouraging. At the moment the press releases indicate that it will be two films, each adapting three volumes of the manga. That seems to be the minimum requirement in terms of screen time to do the story justice, and the editing process that's required to make the story fit will hopefully encourage some good choices in trimming some of the manga's arguably unnecessary excess. A little attention to storytelling logic could even tidy up some of the aforementioned coincidence based plotting that afflicts the first half of the story and streamline the seemingly endless series of climactic confrontations of the final volume. This advance review of the script is encouraging in this regard... hopefully we're in for something that's very faithful to an original that doesn't so much need changing as it does a little editing and cleaning up around the edges.
So, in general, I'm hopeful and certainly more excited than I am about most films at this stage in their development. Over to you... |
