Forum - View topic

NEWS: Twitch Site: Gary Oldman, Helena Bonham-Carter Offered Akira Roles

Why are people assuming the film will follow the anime & not the manga?

I greatly admire both Oldman and Bonham-Carter, but, um... "New Manhattan"??? Plus, imagine an Englishwoman playing a character with a Japanese name!

I mean, it was an anime in the first place for a reason, right?

If they're gonna change the setting from Neo-Tokyo to Neo-Manhattan anyways, it wouldn't make sense to keep the Japanese names.

Uh yeah, because the technology and the budget was not yet there for the Japanese to simulate the world of Akira in live-action.

What, you thought there was an inherent reason that a manga cannot be done in live-action? It's just a matter of convenience.

enurtsol wrote:

If they're gonna change the setting from Neo-Tokyo to Neo-Manhattan anyways, it wouldn't make sense to keep the Japanese names.

Cause, y'know, Manhattan surely has no Japanese people at all. Heaven knows they couldn't keep even one or two of the original names, cause if they did the audience would certainly leave the theater in disgust.

Quote:

Uh yeah, because the technology and the budget was not yet there for the Japanese to simulate the world of Akira in live-action. What, you thought there was an inherent reason that a manga cannot be done in live-action? It's just a matter of convenience.

Sometimes there is a reason other than convenience. Tite Kubo, for example, has specifically said there will never be a live-action Bleach movie because if he wanted to make something that could be replicated in live-action, he would've just made a movie in the first place. There are many things that can't be done in a live-action film, things that no amount of CGI will make look anything but ridiculous. Remember Goku's idiotic-looking Kamehamehadouken at the end of Dragonball Evolution? Yeah. Character designs are another example of this--do you think just about ANYONE from, say, One Piece could be pulled off in live action?

Since it's Manhattan, that's why I mentioned that they could possibly keep the Akira character. Just don't expect the main characters to be; otherwise, they might as well kept it in Tokyo.

And again it boils down to the source material. Some stories are set in entirely fantastical worlds (like Castle in the Sky or Dragonball) in which it really doesn't matter what the ethnicity of the character is.

There's also, of course, a few cases where the characters in a foreign work are decidedly white, even if the people who made it aren't. Fullmetal Alchemist (which takes place in alt-universe version of Germany), for example.

enurtsol wrote:

Since it's Manhattan, that's why I mentioned that they could possibly keep the Akira character. Just don't expect the main characters to be; otherwise, they might as well kept it in Tokyo.

And again it boils down to the source material. Some stories are set in entirely fantastical worlds (like Castle in the Sky or Dragonball) in which it really doesn't matter what the ethnicity of the character is.

In other cases, the story is grounded in a real-world location and has central characters of specific ethnicities (NGE or Akira), at which point you have to ask yourself why you're changing these aspects, even if the story can survive the alteration. Is it because it honestly serves the story just as well or better or just out of crass commercialization that disregards part of the story's essential essence?

And MOST fantastical settings are based on existing cultures. For example, IF they ever make a live-action Howl's Moving Castle, book or the anime, they better make everyone white. Because all the names are white, and the setting is clearly european. So blacks and asians don't exist there.

It's just a matter of time, as technology progresses or becomes affordable. At one point, nobody thought we could do fantastical movies without making it a bit hokey with people/robots in costume suits. But then Jurassic Park became a watershed moment - people and fantasy creatures on the screen at the same time that's believable! (Anybody here cognizant at that time knows how a big deal that moment was.) Now, movies that could only be done with animation before, like Lord of the Rings and Transformers, can be believably done in live-action.

So, point is, never say never. Stuff that we couldn't imagine right now, who knows what can be done decades from now? Me, I'm still waiting for the Holodeck.