Welcome to Oliver Harper’s Retrospectives & Reviews. Like us all at FTN, Oliver LOVES cinema, and like us he has passions that not everyone shares, but he feels obligated to put the word out. This week Oliver looks at Akira – we’ll let him tell you the aims of these videos himself. Over to you, Oliver…
Every week FTN will be hosting videos looking back at classic films from the 80s and early 90s…
The videos will be a retrospective look back at a particular film covering all sides of the production and discussing how the film turned out. Many people on the net generally like to discuss films with a negative attitude and take joy in bashing films for comedic effect which does work but often many of the reviews aren’t researched well or films are taken out of context for the purpose of making a joke and I feel websites such as youtube have become over-saturated with these types of videos, I wanted to do something different.
“Often you come across films with no extras available on the DVD and you want to know more about it, so with some of the upcoming videos I will be discussing films that don’t get the respect they deserve or the ones that aren’t as bad as people think…
AKIRA (1988)
To many, AKIRA was their first introduction to Japanese animation, especially one that was feature length. Most of us who had seen cartoons from Japan felt the animation was rushed and cheap but for AKIRA this was something on an epic scale. Disney features had dominated our screens for years and Akira was a game changer and made Disney look dated. The animation was sleek and this was not aimed at children.
In late 1989 it got released to limited theatres with a new voice dub and didn’t do that well, but its popularity really grew when it came to VHS. It was the must own title if you got into anime and after 26 years it’s still the most impressive animated film I’ve ever seen.
Let’s take a look at one of the most influential animes ever made.
Oliver’s Review:
Original Trailer:
Marc
Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….
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