Bad news first: This isn't a full live-action Akira movie. That still may never happen. (Or maybe it will!) But here's the good news: This fan-made trailer for just such a thing is fantastic.
The clip was created as a crowdsourced outing by a group calling itself the Akira Project, which launched a Indiegogo campaign back in 2012 to realize their dreams—and ours—of a live-action adaptation of the manga-turned-anime. Their fundraising campaign pulled in just under $3,500 and the trailer was filmed in Montreal in November 2012. After a year and a half of post-production, the clip was finally posted just a few days ago.
"What started out as a simple idea between two guys having a beer (Hey! It'd be cool to see Kaneda ride his bike around Neo-Tokyo!), became a global endeavor, filled with adventures and hurdles, involving more than 40 artists in 12 different countries," the trailer's director/producer Nguyen-Anh Nguyen wrote on the project's web site. "We hope to have done justice to the timeless work of [Akira creator] Katsuhiro Otomo and look forward to, someday, seeing the full scope of the Akira story translated to the big screen as a live-action."
So, yeah, about that—any chance we could just give the Akira keys to Nguyen and call it a day?
