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Column by Scott Green
Bloody Disgusting is reporting that the Akira live action movie that was in development from Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way and Warner Bros. Pictures is "dead as a doornail." According to the horror site, director Ruairi Robinson left the now cancelled project. The adaptation was to have been a two part apocalyptic action, set in the Japanese, funded rebuilt city of "New Manhattan." Joseph Gordon-Levitt was supposedly on tap to play biker delinquent turned psychic powerhouse Tetsuo. Reportedly, when the Akira project was being developed, it was targeted for summer 2009.The landmark 1988, Katsuhiro Otomo directed anime version of Akira is now available in North America on Blu-ray through Bandai Entertainment. Amazon listings suggest that Japanese manga publisher Kodansha will be entering the North American market with an October 13th re-release of the Akira manga.
While I Have Your Attention...
Akira blah blah blah... I love the anime and original manga... the live action adaption might have been brilliant, but probably would have been just another prefab summer blockbuster. This morning saw some breaking news on the manga front that really ought to pique the interest of AICNer's is.... Ryan Sands and Evan Hayden, the guys from the Same Hat! blog (featuring horror, gag & erotic-grotesque nonsense) who previously localized Tokyo Zombie, will be preparing Last Gaps's North American release of Suehiro Maruo's "The Strange Tale of Panorama Island." The publication is planned for Spring 2010, and will be only Suehiro Maruo's third book released in English (after Creation Books' "Ultra-Gash Inferno" and Blast Books' "Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show"). From Same Hat's description Panorama is an adaptation of a novella by Japanese detective fiction godfather, Edogawa Rampo. The story takes place at the end of the Taisho era, and follows an unsuccessful science fiction author with an uncanny resemblance to a former classmate/son of a rich industrialist family. When the industrialist's son dies, the author fakes his own death, digs up and hides the other man's body, then washes himself up starving on a beach in a town where the dead man's family lives. After some more intrigue and scheming, he proceeds to take redirect all of their money to build a mysterious pleasure palace island, and live like a sensual weirdo king. Crazy and amazing stuff!A seminal figure in Japanese horror and mystery, Edogawa Rampo is probably best known to anime fans as half of the namesake of Detective Conan's hero Edogawa Conan, and known to horror/mondo film fans as the inspiration for the likes of infamously banned Horror of the Malformed Men. Suehiro Maruo is a noted manga artist from the ero-guro tradition whose graphic work ofteb refers back to ukiyo-e print.
