It has been an extremely long time coming but finally the Anime world has been blessed with a little more news regarding the, constantly delayed, Akira live-action movie. This news comes in the form of two fantastically illustrated pieces of concept art by the extremely talented artist James Clyne who has made his mark in Hollywood as one of the very best concept artists around. Mr. Clyne has worked on some of the biggest movies of our generation, most notably is the James Cameron blockbuster of 2009; “Avatar”. The man was hired as a concept artist for the live-action Akira movie long ago back when Ruairi Robinson was said to be the director.
As you may all know, this project has seen its fair share of interested directors but we may be lucky with its latest one, a man named Jaume Collet-Serra who mentioned in a recent interview that he hopes the next movie he begins working on is Akira. Â The image seen at the start of this article is actually one that was released a while ago though I assume many people either missed it or forgot about it much like myself during its time…let’s say “underground”. As you can see Kaneda keeps his name in the possible live-action film whereas Tetsuo’s has been changed to Travis for Western audiences.
The images I urge you to focus on are the two below this paragraph, they were just released by James Clyne and they look absolutely brilliant. Unfortunetely they’re not new illustrations though, they were done back when the movie was first in the works but, up until just now, they had never been released so maybe that’s a good sign. Our prayers go out the movie Gods; “Please, almighty ones, bring us a live-action Akira movie! A good one!”
