I Am Akira: Akira Project Releases Live Action Trailer

I went to my first comic book convention in 1990, when I was 19 years old. It in no way resembled the comic book conventions I currently attend; it was in a small function room on the second floor of a hotel in Boston’s Chinatown, and was packed with nothing but dealers from local comic stores, with big plywood backboards of rare and old comics that my college student ass wouldn’t be able to afford until he hit 40 years old (and by then, inflation would mean that I still wouldn’t be able to afford them).

There was one exception: there was, as there is at every comic convention in the free world, a table covered in bootleg videos. At the time they were all on hand-Sharpied VHS cassettes, but they had some cool shit. Like Die Hard 2, a couple of days before the movie even opened in theaters (the purchase of which got me so much high school girl tail that summer)…

And Akira, which at the time, I’d never heard of. It wasn’t released in my southeastern Massachusetts town, and it wasn’t really available on commercial video cassette at the time. The dude running the bootleg table was showing the movie on a TV in the background, and I’d never seen animation like that before.

I wound up buying the flick purely based on what I saw on that 19-inch TV screen, and fell in love with the movie. I am not what you’d call a big anime fan, but I have the original DVD special edition of Akira that came out in the early 2000s, in the aluminum clamshell case. I have the MacFarlane Toys Kaneda action figure and his motorcycle displayed on my living room book shelf. I have all six volumes of the Dark Horse Comics English reprint of the original manga (and a bunch of issues of the Epic Comics color reprint of the same series from the late 80s). And I have a print of the original movie poster framed and hanging in the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Studio.

These are all reasons why I, like many people, have been ambivalent at best and angry at worst about the repeating reports that studios are working on a live action adaptation of Akira. Particularly when those rumors included the casting of Keanu Reeves. Why? I will allow you to insert your own “Tetsu – whoa!” joke here, because I am a classy man.

When that version of the movie went down, no tears were shed here, and we hoped that no one would take on the task of a live action Akira movie again. However, while the studio project has been in turnaround, some people running something called The Akira Project raised some crowdfunding cash to put together a live action Akira trailer. Which they have completed. And for which I had no hope.

Until I saw it. And. Holy. Shit.