One may die: The Akira live action that never was

So the other may live.

Well it’s not that messianic, but it seems official that the Akira live action film is totally DOA as of a little while ago. I think I can participate in the collective sigh of relief with much of the movie watching community to know that “Akira” will not go the way of Speed Racer, Dragon Ball, and Street Fighter, and descend into the collective utter crap-fest that is the cinematic evolutionary branch of “Hollywood Re-make.” Such a feeling however, must be tinted with a shade of regret for what might have been. Could an Akira live action be a good movie? Sure it could. Would it have been? Almost assuredly not. The only way to make it a good movie, would be to re-make it, shot for shot, with as much of the original story intact as possible. What would have happened though, is the inevitable “new vision” or “updating” or “tweaking for a new audience” that would have run roughshod over any actual script/technical advisers they had on the project… if any. I could see an ending where some Caucasian looking Kaneda modding his motorcycle A-Team style with rockets controlled by a PSP or some shit, for a final showdown with Tetsuo who doesn’t have psychic powers or a disgruntled anti-social youth culture mind set, rather he’s been taken over by some A.I. which runs all of future-mega-tokyo-robot-land and slowly turns him into a cyborg which allows him to do shit like fling garbage trucks at Kaneda while rolling down a highway all i-Robot style as he rides on his future-bike to the center of the city to finally free his kidnapped love interest who was invented for the movie and is played by played by Kristin Kreuk. And they wonder why people don’t bother going to movies anymore. Thank you “Legend of Chun Li.”

But whenever the noodly appendage closes a door, the great Flying Spaghetti Monster opens a can of awesome somewhere else. Futurama is finally getting the Family Guy treatment and is getting some new episodes made. I like Futureama a lot, but after feeling so fucked over (not as bad as “who is Cartman’s Father fucked over, but fucked over none the less) by the Family Guy “DVD Movie” (that shit was so bad I actually gave it away in front of a Best Buy to prevent someone from buying it and wasting their own money), I didn’t get that into the Futurama “movies” even though they were cleaver, a fun watch, and animated just fine. But, I am happy about this new development and hoping for Hulu distribution, even though from here in Tokyo I have to keep going to new lengths just to get around Hulu’s international filtering bullshit (FYI it works better if you… wait, no they’ll probably find out about that just that much faster if I spill the beans here). I know what you’re thinking and don’t even start.

The resurrection of Futurama is a positive outcome of an otherwise dismal development of producers being terrified of new and creative ideas in Entertainment, aka “Hollywood is out of Ideas,” which is so awesome when you see smart new films like “The Hangover” beat total shiat like “Land of the Lost.” It’s not that I want to see movie theaters go away, but they are the single only collective group which still enables the MPAA and their stifiling of the creative process. Labels and studios would gladly leave those fuck-wads in the dust if theater box office receipts dipped low enough to make them less relevant. The fact that the MPAA is a private and not a government organization will allow movie makers to drop their participation in the “voluntary” rating system without a single bit of interference.

But the “out of ideas” disease is unfortunately in full swing here in the land of Otaku culture as well, as we get ready for more reboots. One which I am particularly loathe to see is the Azumanga Daioh manga republication. It’s the same story… drawn again. This time however the art is disturbing much more on the Yotsuba side of things. Now artists can get better and one look at the early atrocities of Kozuke Fujishima when compared to later works, show that this is an almost universally good thing (except for Rumiko Takahashi who has gotten worse, and Masamune Shiro who went from meh to awesome to crazy). Not in this case however, where the signature style of what made Azumanga Azumanga are gone, only to be replaced with what looks like lazy practice drawing. The notion that time and money are going into something we’ve seen before and not something new. You can see Azuma’s poor excuse about pulling a George Lucas on the series on his personal site here (Japanese). Look for the new and improved Azumanga Daioh anime to have the airgun replaced with a walkie talkie in the matsuri scene, and for the character of Tomoe to be played by Jar Jar Binks.

If it sells books then great, but if the story is the same and the art has less detail, then I’d rather have something I haven’t read before.

It's the Economy Baka,

When Akira goes from Dystopian to Utopian.


Now that the sky is falling, is the very way of life for the new century otaku going to fade away like SUVs, air travel, and free trips to the salad bar? Anime has already made the irreversible step from niche export to global entertainment media, and as such its fate is tied to the health of global markets in general as a source of financing, and as a means of sustaining healthy consumer sales (sagging economy means people buy less).

The world has seen for a while now that the health of entire economies and not just industry specific issues is what will affect the ability of anime, manga, and the culture that goes with it, to continue as a commercial product. Something it must do in order to survive at all. So let's look at Japan's situation, which can be summed up in the immortal words of Generation X's own answer to Winnie the Poo, Peter Griffin; "Had better days Lois... Had better days."

The Japanese economy has been acting strangely ever since NOVA hit an iceberg (of their own making) and went down hard, followed by political shenanigans, and now we have a NOVA repeat with academic services provider Gateway 21 having to announce this past Sunday they were "broke." For those not in the know, they ceased operations after running 12.9 Billion Yen in now unrecoverable debt. 12.9 Billion Yen from young students paying for study abroad courses which they will now never get to attend, nor will they get that money back. This is a minor news story to most of the world but a little inside info is that the Gateway domino might just knock over larger firms such as Education Japan Corp. This sector toppling over with Enronian results to customers and investors may not hurt the Japanese anime/media/entertainment industry directly, but at this point the impact on the National economy is enough to make just about everyone except sake brewers and Cup o' Noodles nervous.

With America's core anime market dependant on mommy and daddy's money than their own a sagging economy means less direct purchasing power as well as less of an ability to purchase products from advertisers which keep anime on the air, where it needs to be in order to sustain itself.

Evolution doesn’t happen when things are going great, but rather when drastic changes in the environment make adaptation necessary or face the consequence of extinction. The adaptation that seems to be the nicest looking right now is simultaneous global delivery, the only way in which the consortium of companies attached to just about any anime project can pool their resources and actually earn revenue from the true size of their audience.

For most of the past year, this is where the story has ended. From the conspicuous absence of ADV from the New York Anime Festival (if they don't show up to A-KON, stick a fork in them) to the sucking sound that is Japanese anime production and 4 Kids taking their money elsewhere, there seemed to be no real hope of making things happen other than the fact that the few remaining players in the Japan-US field had found a way to minimize the down time and shave a few points off of sales and meager licensing. Add to the mix that shows like VSDA and LIMA are dinosaurs living out their last dying days in Las Vegas, and there was very little hope for the future. Until recently.

Current Japanese Prime Minister Aso has on more than one occasion publicly stated that his government is looking at Japanese IP with an emphasis on Manga Anime and Video Games as a global export which can bolster the Japanese economy. As soon as a delivery system comes across the table that works with the same kind of security as Komatsu gets for heavy machinery (ie you get actual revenue from global markets instead of fansubs taking money away from potential earnings by making advertizing guarantees worthless).


So yes anime fans it seems like what we want and consume, otaku culture itself is getting a v.i.p. trip to the front of the government subsidy line in the land of the rising sun. If by some miracle, the right kind of person steps up and uses that to create a new media delivery infrastructure and not simply prop up a failing antiquated system, we are looking at a new golden age born out of the greatest economic flux in almost a century.


-TAO