Why Akira is the most influential anime of all time After 35 years Akira is still the biggest obsession of Hollywood and Kanye West
If there is an almost impossible feat in today's Hollywood that everyone would like to accomplish, it would certainly be the big-screen adaptation of Akira, the anime of Katsuhiro Otomo released over thirty years ago, in 1988, grossing 49 million dollars worldwide, and still remains one of the main cornerstones of Eastern culture in the West. There are many reasons that led Leonardo DiCaprio, George Miller, Jordan Peele and Taika Waititi to approach Otomo's work in the hope of turning it into a live-action mega-production. And the best to sum them all was the journalist Hau Chu, who in a Washington Post article two years ago analyzed the film's cultural legacy by framing Akira as a precursor to that fictional sci-fi futurist style that we see today, for example, in the Marvel Universe.
What is Akira and why is it so relevant?
After a giant Big Bang destroyed Tokyo and kicked off World War III, in 2019 the streets of the renovated Neo Tokyo are teeming with revolting activists and biker groups. Among them is Tetsuo, part of a gang led by his friend Kaneda, who after meeting a child with the likeness of an elderly man named Akira will begin to develop incredible powers that will lead him to clash with the forces that control the civilization of the future.
After the accusations of whitewashing and the subsequent flop of the live-action adaptation of Ghost in the Shell Hollywood seemed intent on continuing with attempts to adapt Akira by giving the role of director to Taika Waititi, but clashing with two problems not least: the fate and irreproducibility of the art. The film, in fact, was frozen in the pre-production phase when Waititi committed to directing Thor's franchise fourth film for Marvel Studios and, although it will probably be made at some point, it is likely that Warner Bros. isn't' in too much of a hurry, given the history of failure that American adaptations of Japanese anime have always had.
