AKIRA Creator Katsuhiro Otomo Has Final Approval Over The Live-Action Film Concept

As you know, Warner Bros. has been trying to get a live-action adaptation of the classic Akira anime and manga for years! The most recent director approached to helm the film was Jordan Peele, but he ultimately turned it down because he wanted to focus on his original story ideas.

One day this movie is going to happen. I think it's inevitable. It's just waiting for the right talent to come along. While I wouldn't mind if the live-action Akira film never happened, I'm still interested to see how it would turn out. 

There is a ray of hope to this live-action Akira project, though. During a recent interview with Forbes, Akira creator Katsuhiro Oto revealed that he has final approval over the direction they want to take the film's story. That was a major condition he made before he signed the rights over to the studio. He explains: 

"While I haven’t seen the new live-action Ghost in the Shell, when it comes to Akira I have already finished the original manga and my own anime version, too. So in that sense, I am basically done with Akira. If someone wants to do something new with Akira then I am mostly okay with that. As I accepted the offer for a live-action Akira to be made, so I am generally okay with whatever they want to do with it. However, I did give one major condition to a live-action version and that is that I had to check and approve the scenario."

It's good to know that the creator of Akira will at least have final approval of the concept that the studio ends up going with. I don't think he would approve something that isn't up to par with his creation.

There's one other piece of information I found in the interview that I found interesting.  Otomo thought the first anime film, was going to be a failure! He felt miserable after he saw the completed version of the film. Here's what he had to say about that:

“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.

“To give some examples of what I mean, there were just too many cuts. I think there were more than two thousand cuts in the end. That meant we didn’t have enough animators to do all the work. So each animator had way more work than they could do, so that meant they did a lot of overtime and had to make compromises in terms of animation quality. In addition, the studio had to outsource the animation abroad to reduce the costs and they weren’t very good."

I guess when you are so close to a project like that, all of the faults are going to stick out like a sore thumb. The movie is a masterpiece, though! He went on to say that he liked it more when it was remade with the 5 channel audio, saying:

“However, when Shoji Yamashiro did the remake with 5 channel audio, he invited me over and showed me the movie again. So this was a very long time since I had seen the movie back when it was released. Maybe time had made me softer but when I saw it again I thought, 'Oh, this is interesting' and that maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.”

It definitely wasn't as bad as he thought it was. Anyway, if he got that upset over the amazing anime adaptation of his manga, I seriously doubt he's going to let any stupid ass ideas make it into the live-action movie.