Interest

Fans Create CG Tribute to Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira

Two talented fans, Brad Kremer of Brad Kremer Films and Dean Fowler of Machine Films, have created a stunning CG tribute trailer for Katsuhiro Ōtomo's classic cyperpunk film Akira.

Kremer wrote the following about the project upon posting the video:

This project started many years ago when both Dean and I lived on Tybee Island. I came to Dean with the idea to do a tribute “trailer” to Akira. As a long time fan of the original film he of course loved the idea! As we brainstormed the story that we wanted to explore from the film we settled on focusing primarily on the bike. The Akira bike is one of those iconic symbols that still remains relevant today similar to the Millennium Falcon or Marty McFly's beat up DeLorean.

Since that first day when Dean and I began this journey we have both moved a number of times. But we always kept the project alive with a lot of late nights (mostly from Dean), re-edits and re-renders, and a lot of discussions about how to improve it. And so, after countless hours of modeling and rendering we are ready to share with you this short tribute to the masterpiece that Katsuhiro Ōtomo created and shared with us so many years ago. We hope you enjoy!

The 1988 animated film Akira was highly influential and is considered a landmark work. It was based on Otomo's manga of the same name, which was first serialized in Japan from 1982 to 1990 in Young Magazine and was later compiled into 6 manga volumes.

This is not the first time that fans have created tribute trailers for Akira. A live-action fan trailer called the Akira Project was completed by a group of fans back in 2014, and the independent French filmmaker Fabien Dubois created his own short live-action tribute video in 2012.