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Akira , the remake of the classic animation , has come in for a new raft of criticism after Toby Kebbell publicly criticised the script for the floundering Warner Bros project.
Production has been halted for a while on the troubled reboot, with Warner instructing director Jaume Collet-Sera to do some more work on the script.
Kebbell was one of the actors asked to read for a part, and as a fan of the franchise, he was only too excited to do so. However, once he'd read the script, he soon felt differently.
"They were like, ‘This is going to be a big franchise!’” says Kebbell. “So I said, ‘Then in that case, understand that I’ve read the comics, and I’ve read the comics that got turned into the annuals, and then the annuals that got turned into the one-off anime. So if you really want to do it, then why don’t you look at the six comics and just put two into each film?’”
"I told them, ‘Then this is a remake [ of the animated movie ], and I don’t want to do a live-action remake of the cartoon, because [ the cartoon ] is perfect and you’re not going to do it dark enough — so therefore, I don’t want to do it."
All of which sounds pretty reasonable, but when he comes to discuss the finer details of the plot, things sound a bit more worrying.
"The other thing they wanted to do was make [ Tetsuo and Kaneda ] brothers,” he explains. “I was like, ‘The point is that Tetsuo can’t comprehend how someone who isn’t his brother could love him so much — and that’s where his wrath and his rage come from. Do you not see that? Why have you made them brothers? What the fuck are you doing?"
Couldn't have put it better ourselves, Toby. At present, Akira still remains in limbo, but given all the effort that has gone into it so far, don't expect them to give up on it any time soon...
