Akira: Classic Or Dud?

the comic helped but the film was huge, i remember seeing it with a friend and then afterward the two of us deciding we would get 'tetsuo' and 'kaneda' (sic?) vanity tags (we were fifteen, very very ready to drive, and had heard vanity tags were only like fifteen bucks more and hence couldn't figure out why EVERYONE didn't have vanity tags) and then arguing who whould get what. i haven't seen it since high school so i have no idea how well it's held up but it was huge at the time.

― j blount (papa la bas), Thursday, March 10, 2005 6:15 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i love this post

lol cankles what animes do u like, if any?

still think ian should read the manga ^_^

FLCL and miyazaki and patlabor, that's about it

there's a lot more good manga than anime imo

by miyazaki i mean ghibli in general cuz isao takahata brings tha hotness too

the akira manga is one of the all thyme great comics imo

agreed

patlabor

hmmm double checked wiki i guess theres a few movies and the "mobile police" series that im familiar with - anything in particular or is it all good?

it's basically all good. iirc there's two OVAs, a tv series and three movies (i havent seen the third and last movie because i think HEADGEAR had little to do with it) - it's giant robots meets gasoline alley with blue collar protagonists plus a heavy dosage of police procedural shit. mamoru oshii got his start there, and the patlabor 2 movie he directed is basically a direct antecedent of the ghost in the shell movie.

I wish I'd actually gone ahead and bought the rest of the Dark Horse reprints from earlier in the decade - got the first two then never got around to finishing it. Now I'm basically waiting for the next reprint (whereever, whenever it comes).

wow are they out of print already? bummer dude they're ~*amazing*~ too

they're impossible to find now, but back when marvel/epic was publishing the comic in the 80s they put out a set of hardcover, colorized AKIRA volumes. it was colored on computers and was pretty revolutionary at the time, though it kinda looks like crap now. interesting artifact anyway~

i remember seeing ghost in the shell in the theater, w/my friend and his dad as 'chaperone'

that was uncomfortable

please tell more of this story!

oh mostly because dude's parents were pretty conservative, and we had no idea that the first fifteen or whatever minutes would consist of a naked chick running around

nhex kodansha is supposedly going to reprint akira and ghost in the shell this fall under their own imprint

weird. the titan books ed. (which are the titan books version but with 'titan books' on the spine) appears to still be in print in the uk

mb del rey or tokyopop want to do a nice tankobon size set of them so they can be shelved with everything else

xpost oh ok

how did conservadad get the idea that a cartoon needed to be chaperoned? this is where general public's obliviousness to anime would come in handy.

because we lived in the country and were 14 and needed a ride into the city

this would be mega-awkward if they showed trailer for bad lieutenant beforehand.

(my recollection is that anime used to play in arthouse theaters that also showed stuff like bad lieutenant)

hmm I wonder if the library has english versions of the akira manga

I still haven't finished reading, tbh, because I found a big batch of the Marvel reprints for cheap once and I still need to fill the gaps. And I'd much rather have the colorized versions because they are so pretty. One of the few times you will hear me rep for colorization.

I don't know anything about anime/manga, but does all manga that aims at being taken seriously lead to a grand abstract mystical/spiritual union of everything?

ya p much

haha!

how can that account for things like Lupin III?

can it really be said that lupin "aims at being taken seriously"?

that's not a dis btw, most of this shit could learn to take itself less seriously

lol no i suppose not, i wasn't thinking of that bit--and certainly i agree that it's a plus when anime doesn't take itself too seriouly. i've lost my tolerance for retarded cosmology and convoluted hierarchies in my shit. i just want laffs n dope animation, maybe a wee bit of the old ultraviolence. which reminds me--watching Akira last night on dvd it was significantly gorier than what i remember from my youth.

"i've lost my tolerance for retarded cosmology and convoluted hierarchies in my shit."
I haven't read/watched that much, but I can't think of anything outside akira that does this sincerely/seriously, but maybe this is because i've never watched most series to the end. tell me dragon ball and lone wolf and cub don't end this way. I can tell you Sanctuary is retarded-cosmology-free, but is full of call for political consciousness being cover for sublimated homosexuality.

http://photos-c.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs164.snc1/6128_146522375751_739675751_3455842_6954930_n.jpg

http://www.threewordphrase.com/embarrassing.jpg

most amazing internet rumour:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/nov/08/zac-efron-akira-shotaro-kaneda

This reminds me of the little news-in-briefs you'd get in nerdy magazines of the late 80s and early 90s: Richard Gere to play Blue Beetle! Frank Miller to script new Michael Elphick drama... etc

oh no...

akira was def the first anime i saw. at some point in the mid 90s me and other teenage friends became very aware of it somehow. is that when it started showing on cable? we totally fetishized it for the gore. ninja scroll too.

i thought i read somewhere dicaprio or frodo baggins had secured the rights to make this a year ago?

are you thinking about Tobey MacGuire's Robotech thing?

No, DiCaprio's been dying to make this for years now.

lawl elf quest. i still have my record of lodoss and neon genesis evangelion vhs tapes i used to buy one every two weeks w/my allowance then dvd hit ;_;

LOL! This describes my experience as well, Lamp!

Haha, I have a bunch of old anime VHS tapes lying in the shelf too: Akira, Ninja Scroll, Wicked City, Wings of Honneamise (awesome movie, this one), Battle Angel Alita, Dragon Half (funny shit) Patlabor, Ghost in the Shell, etc etc. I don't know why I haven't thrown them away, I haven't owned a video player nor a TV set for years.

First Efron now . . . Franco?

http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/news/a303460/franco-in-talks-for-live-action-akira.html

Otomo doing new stuff: https://variety.com/2019/film/asia/anime-japan-otomo-katsuhiro-orbital-era-film-akira-1203259908/

Ok I am finally going to read Domu this weekend