AKIRA 2007 Presentation by Ruairi Robinson

"In 2007, Ruairí Robinson was hired by Warner Bros. to direct a live-action remake of Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 Japanese animated classic Akira. To secure the rights to Akira, WB had Robinson put together a rip reel. That's when a director cuts together footage from other movies to give viewers an idea of what the film will be like." -reported comicbook.com

"This was the original presentation I put together to help WB secure the rights for Akira back in 2007.

It consists of a trailer I cut using the original anime, a rip reel of references from other movies, and a few visual tests I did in a hurry to give an impression of the movie. The whole thing was put together in 3 frantic weeks fueled by a lot of coffee.

I'm not a big fan of rip reels to be honest, because it's hard to represent the movie you want to make by sampling other movies that don't really look like it... and purists may balk at the "New Manhattan" in the trailer (this reverted to New Tokyo very soon afterwards by the first draft of the script.) Unfortunately they couldn't get the budget under 200 million bucks for that draft which was a bit rich for what was proposed as an R rated movie with no stars.

But if nothing else, hell, at least I cut a pretty cool trailer for the original anime." -shared Ruairí Robinson.

[ More screengrabs HERE, in case the video guts pulled ]