Pages Yellowed

There’s apparently going to an adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s “Akira” by Warner Bros.

According to Reuters, this Jaume (House of Wax) Collet-Serra directed movie is set in New York and follows a biker who tries to rescue his friend from medical experiments.

Good luck to them, but going by the dismal Dragon Ball remake, fans of the Manga shouldn’t hold their breath too much.

I bought my copy of Akira a long time ago for RM30ish (can’t remember how much exactly) at a bookshop in (then) Lot 10 across Sungei Wang Plaza.

The pages have yellowed since then, but every now and then, I’ll pop into the storeroom-cum-temporary reading room for a quick glance.

Wish I could get the whole series, but it’s a whole lot of money to be handed over to the cashier at RM100plus plus these days each volume.

The anime was also hoot, despite cramming the 2,000 page epic into 125 minutes.

Another favorite which also received the adaptation treatment was Kazuo Koike’s Crying Freeman.

Video cassette was still the norm when I got my hands on the first few chapters of the tear shedding assassin, Yo Hinamura.

Mark Dacascos fared well enough as Hinamura in the adaptation, but replicating the sleek, silky moves in the anime was an impossibly BIG challenge.

Back to Akira.

The crash-boom-banging nature of Katsuhiro’s Akira makes it the perfect cannon fodder for a similar CGI-filled, crash-boom-banging charge ala the latest installment of the Transformers series.

It is however up to a formidable comparison with the original anime, and that is quite a high benchmark to achieve in the eyes of fans.

Wonder if anyone intends to adapt Otomo’s Domu – A Child’s Dream?

Could be a blast of an adaptation.