Why haven't they adapted the manga?
I imagine it's because the insane details in the background will require alot of man hours to draw.
Why haven't they adapted the manga?
I think it's entirely unclear what is going on with the rebel/terrorist group that Kay is a part of. What are their goals and what are they opposing?
Lady Miyako's role in Neo-Tokyo is also unclear, though apparently that was a major manga character that got reduced to a bit part in the film.
Why wasn't there much production value put into the drawing and animation of women?
Oh, I'm gonna need to find $135 somewhere...
But what does "original Japanese onomatopoeia" mean?
As if everyone hasn't had enough evangelizing the manga, I'll have to do my part as well.
There's a 35-year anniversary boxset coming out towards the end of the year, all in hardcover, not published by Dark Horse, but by Kodansha USA. What's special in this edition is that it reads right-to-left, with original Japanese onomatopoeia. Also includes the Akira Club artbook.
What if you complain that the Akira in the Anime isn't well fleshed-out? Well, that's because the manga isn't anywhere near finished when the movie came out. This collection will rectify all that.
You had to be there
Yeah, there's a whole new age/millenialism/death cult subtext in the manga with Miyako which is reduced to a cameo n the movie where she's used as local colour - although it's pretty clear she's the figurehead of a cult of some description - again, I'm not familiar enough with mid-late 80s Japan to know if millennial death-cults were a notable social issue at the time, but that single scene in the movie conveys enough given the context of the rest of the story to know this isn't a happy-clapper deal.
The women look like male characters with longer hair in Akira....what?
More than that, it really helped if you saw it on the big screen. There just wasn't anything as stylish or well-animated up to that point in the '80s or for years afterward.
It did get a limited 35mm release.Did Akira actually get a theatrical release in the United States? I thought it went straight to VHS. I can't imagine any distributors wanting to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to strike celluloid prints of the film. Even in the digital era, anime movies rarely get released to theaters unless it's Ghibli.
I get it. It might be my least favourite Miyazaki film.Ok, op i can understand but if you don't get why people love Mononoke i am not going to believe a single thing you say
I may be wrong on this, but I think Akira was the first thing on that level of darkness or violence to reach US shores. Wicked City and Golgo 13 followed based on the success of Akira.I don't know a single person who loves Akira and it was their "introduction to anime", including myself. Anime was already all over the place in the US when Akira got its initial popularity. You can maybe argue the violence in it was notable, but you're still talking about a generation of people who grew up on stuff like Robotech, and in the same era we were seeing things like Wicked City or even Golgo 13.
Is there any easy way to read or obtain the colorized manga version that Marvel/Epic released in the early 90's?
You'll find that people who love the film will often also not want Hollywood to remake it because movies like Akira don't get made anymore without serious compromises across the board. As to precisely what makes Akira's animation so revolutionary:
It's animated 'on ones' which means 24 distinct drawings for 1 second of film. This is extremely labor intensive and expensive, but it gives every action shot a real weight to it.
And while the camera is often held still to let you appreciate the movement of the background, characters and props, they're also perfectly willing to move the camera around a complicated action shot, meaning everything in the shot is changing each frame, while keeping the lines of motion, shot composition, perspective, secondary animation loops and negative space razor sharp throughout. I need to emphasize how rare this is.
Even if you don't like the stylization of the humans (the lip movement in particular threw me the first time I watched the dub) there's plenty of good writing going on
This very short cut tells you just about everything you need to know about the relationship between Kaneda and Tetsuo, and it's almost entirely done by the animation itself. The plot itself is laced with a lot of pseudoscience babble and I can respect those who felt it got a little precious with the explanations from the doctor, but I don't think it really overshadows Tetsuo's tragic downfall or Kaneda's hunt for revenge. The political upheaval and threat of the apocalypse are all background to a rather personal tale between two old friends and that's really the part of Akira's story I connect with.
It's not a perfect movie, but the consensus is that it's a masterpiece for a lot of good reasons. There's intensity and passion behind every single frame of film, the soundtrack is incredible, the action is stunning, the moments of psychedelic horror still cause me to recoil. It's not only that they don't make animated features like this anymore, they seldom make action or sci fi movies like this anymore.
This group shot is an animation marvel:
What a herculean task.
THANK YOUUUUUUUUUUU!! the movie is straight up trash, i honestly don't get why people go so hard for it. the plot is a fucking mess and theres not a single likable character. the only nice thing about it is its animation and the second you make it live action it loses the only nice thing about it.
It did get a limited 35mm release.
I managed to get the hardcover, numbered limited editions of books 1-5 in colour. I think book 6 was never released in that format sadly. The artwork in colour is just beautiful.
You had to be there
It was a lot of people's "first anime" in the late 80s/early 90s and it has a lot of nostalgia tied to it for that reason. It's a cash grab in the major body of moviegoers these days.
It really was impressive for the time (1988) but hasn't aged super well.
That soundtrack, tho. :O
It was a lot of people's "first anime" in the late 80s/early 90s and it has a lot of nostalgia tied to it for that reason. It's a cash grab in the major body of moviegoers these days.
It really was impressive for the time (1988) but hasn't aged super well.
That soundtrack, tho. :O
You had to be there
Bullshit. Even Ghibli cant match the animation in Akira.this
and this..
Bullshit. Even Ghibli cant match the animation in Akira.
This thread is fucking depressing.
You had to be there? Bullshit, I wasn't and I certainly love the movie.
This thread is fucking depressing.
You had to be there? Bullshit, I wasn't and I certainly love the movie.
The plots of all those earlier movies. Akira, Hits and ninja scroll and Eva are fucking trash. Just watch the pretty animation.
KANEDAAAAAAAAAAA!TETTTSSSUUUUUOOOOOOOOO
This thread is fucking depressing.
You had to be there? Bullshit, I wasn't and I certainly love the movie.
Not depressing, it's just that it was so different.
Yeah, I've never really felt like I agreed with people who say the plot sucks. At it's core there's a very simple emotional arc pulling the characters through the story, and while not all of the external details are perfectly explained I think, for me, it only adds to the tangible nature of Akira's Tokyo. As an audience member, you feel like you're looking through a window into a preexisting world with it's own history, politics, and spirituality and the film version gives you just enough hints about the nature of that world that some of the specific details of it don't necessarily​ need to be explicitly explained to me. I can make my own insinuations about motivations and backgrounds based on the incredibly dense amount of detail put into the setting.Akira blew my damn mind when I first saw it ten years ago, and it's only improved for me on repeat viewings. It's practically unrivaled purely on a technical audio-visual level. The plot's a lot more straightforward than people make it out to be: the rivalry of two brothers growing into their own selves interposed with youth violently destroying a corrupt, decaying power whose time has come. There's a lot of rich world-building surrounding it, but the details aren't essential.
Hot take: the movie is better than the (also excellent) manga, because it's forced to keep things very elemental.
You really didn't "have to be there" to appreciate Akira. Beyond the particular cultural context of mid-80s bubble economy Japan, it's aged incredibly well.