Akira’s Creator Isn’t All That Excited About The Franchise’s 35th Anniversary

Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira is one of the most beloved anime/manga franchises of all time. The sci-fi story transported readers and watchers to a whole new world, and is still highly revered to this day. Recently Akira has been back in the public’s eye, as there is a Hollywood adaptation in development, as well as the 35th anniversary of the franchise. But not everyone is excited about the resurgence of popularity, as the creator behind the franchise, Otomo, has grown distant and cold towards his own franchise. Otomo is still an active creator and artist, at 63 years old he commented on his feeling and thoughts on Akira to Forbes magazine.

When he was asked about the first time he saw the hit film, he thought that the movie was a failure. The movie seemed to not be what the director had in mind, and thought that the film took away from his original story. When asked about the first time he saw the movie, he said the following:

“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.”

However looking back on it now, he does not seem to have such a harsh feeling about the film. In fact after seeing the HD remake, he seemed to enjoy it much more than the first time, telling the interviewer:

“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.”

When it comes to the possible upcoming live-action movie that is in development, the creator is ok with one condition. He stated that he is “basically done” with Akira, so he is ok with a Hollywood rendition, as long as he checks and approves the scenario. But after it’s all said and done, he thinks that Akira doesn’t make sense as a movie, and he has moved on to new and separate things.