Am I the only one who thinks Akira is a bit shit?
The original Manga Video translation (the one where the bloke who did one of the TMNT in the original Fred Wolf 'toons did the voice of Kaneda) was bloody awful, dwelling on a juvenile translation to sell the film in the west to a primary audience of ADHD teens, and while the later dub corrected a lot of script errors and clarified WTF some of the damn thing was about, the film still comes across as dull and aimless. Looks nice, yes, and I'm not casting dispersions on Otomo's craftsmanship, but it's ultimately soul-less and a large measure of it's reputation as a 'classic' seems to stem from it being an early mainstream anime and one of the first to get a wide release over here, even though there were better examples of anime doing the rounds before that, such as reasonably faithful dubs/edits of My Neighbour Totorro and Laputa: The Flying Island.
The story, I think, just isn't strong enough, and any westernisation will need a heavy plot facelift.
