You don't have to tell me twice about how much it sucks to not be taken seriously, no matter how well you hone your skills. And I'm betting many of you reading this can probably relate. Think of a time in your life when, despite your expertise and passion, it either took an inordinately long amount of time to convince someone that you knew what you were talking about. Or worse still, you just couldn't.
Hopefully, you're at a point when you can recognize that's a problem with them, and not with you.
But I have that issue in common with animation. You see, I'm old enough to remember a time when adults older than me made the erroneous assumption that if a thing was animated, that meant it was automatically meant only for children. That it was simple, and not capable of complicated, multi-layered storytelling.
Like lots of kids, I watched my fair share of Disney films and the like growing up. Both things that were made and released in my lifetime, as well as the classics made well before I was born. While I'm not the mega-Disney fan that my sister is (she's met all the princesses in person more than once, I assure you), we grew up knowing, learning, loving, and singing far more musicals than I can tell you.
And then, there was anime. Which, while originally inspired by early Disney animation (I mean, how could you not be?), branched and branched again into all kinds of interesting, strange, and wonderful directions. Including impressive sci-fi and dystopian worlds that could hardly be adequately expressed in any other medium.
It took the international rise in popularity of anime to make the clearest case yet for why animation is not, and has not been, a medium only useful for telling stories to and for young children. One of animation's biggest strengths has always been the fact that it only has two main limitations: Artistic imagination/ability to execute on that imagination, and resources enough to let the story unfold as it should.
Anything and everything you can dream of is possible in animation. Not so with live-action. Which is why we need to talk about everyone continuing to try to make a live-action Akira.
Different Media Work Better for Different Stories
With live-action films, technology has always been both a blessing and a curse. There's a reason the practical creature effects in Paul Verhoeven's excellent satire Starship Troopers still look freaking amazing in 2025, while films from the early days of CGI tend to look incredibly dated to modern eyes. Thus it has been; thus it shall continue to be as technology and filmmaking march forward.
Going on the assumption that you, like me, are a multilayered, multifaceted enthusiast, I'm going to also assume that you already know there are some things that work better as movies, or as limited series, or as comics. While it's often the case that the person (or people) who first told the story did it best, that's not always the case. Case in point: the animated film Robot Dreams, which had me sobbing by the end. (It's brilliant; go watch it immediately if you haven't seen it.)
It is, arguably, the same story; but for myself, I found it to be far more effective as an animated film than in graphic novel form. You might feel differently, and that's OK! That's the point of art, isn't it? To make us feel something.
Akira is a massive, looming shadow in the anime world. Ever since its release in the late 1980s (early 1990s if you were in the US), it's been considered a mega, mind-bending masterwork in the sci-fi/dystopian anime genre. The Katsuhiro Otomo classic received a cinematic release in Japan, and has had theatrical screenings internationally in the decades since. Even for non-anime fans, its sci-fi elements have given it a certain amount of crossover appeal for fans of that genre.
Because it's about the story, and how it's told. The extremely tense and effective cinematic score also helps; it's a cohesive, immersive cinematic experience. One that's effectively told, I would argue, because it is animated. Not in spite of that fact, because of it.
Since the early 2000s, Warner Bros. has held the rights to make a live-action version of Akira, and it's tried countless times to get different projects off the ground. While some attempts have gotten further along than others, it's still failed every single time. That meant, for years, it's been stuck in what seems to be the very definition of "development hell."
Now, in June 2025, those live-action rights have reverted back to the Japanese publisher of the original comics that Otomo's animated classic was based on, Kodansha. And honestly: GOOD.
Because the best we could possibly have hoped for would be something like Bumblebee (itself arguably a live-action retelling of the truly underrated animated film The Iron Giant) in terms of having an actual, heartfelt story into which a bunch of CG was integrated (and not used to completely overshadow). More likely, we would've ended up with an incoherent mess; all spectacle and style but very little substance (see: just about every other live-action Transformers movie).
And that's not why people still love the original animated film, decades later. This isn't a new argument; it's one that flares up every time modern Disney announces a live-action version of one of its animated classics, as well. In their case, it feels tired and cynical in a different way, because it's their own IP they're mining, seemingly because they're out of ideas to feed the ever-insatiable content mill that is our modern world.
There's a reason that motorcycle enthusiasts still draw inspiration from Otomo's Akira, to the point where they're still building fantastic homages to Kaneda's motorcycle well into the 21st century. Could a live-action version achieve that level of recognition and love decades later? It seems extremely unlikely.
But what do you think? Am I wrong, and are you absolutely dying to see a live-action version of Akira, maybe shot to be screened in IMAX this time around? Or could you not possibly care less, even if you think Kaneda's bike looks cool? Let me know in the comments.
