Akira

Akira is a 1988 Japanese animated science fiction film directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, written by Otomo and Izo Hashimoto. The screenplay is based on Otomo's manga of the same name.

The film has become a hugely popular cult film and is widely considered to be a landmark in Japanese animation.

Dubbing History
It should be noted that Akira is a trickier anime product to dub due to the fact that, unlike standard anime procedure, the original voices were recorded first and the mouth movements were drawn to match. Traditionally in anime, the mouth moving animation is done with simplistic mouth flapping while the recording is done afterward.

The movie was first dubbed by Electric Media, Inc. and Wally Burr Recording for Kodansha Ltd. and saw a limited theatrical release in America on December 25, 1989. In North America, the English-dubbed version of movie was distributed by Streamline Pictures. This dub is often incorrectly referred to as the "Streamline dub" because of this, not helped by the fact that the voice cast had a number of regulars for Streamline's dubs.

In 2001, a new dub was produced by Animaze for Pioneer Entertainment's DVD release, which also saw a limited release in theaters. The Animaze version was the only English dub distributed in the United States for several years afterwards, while the original dub appeared on the UK and Australian DVDs. Following the release of FUNimation Entertainment's Blu-ray version of the film in 2013, both dubs have since been featured in American home media releases. A 4K Blu-ray disc will be released on December 22, 2020.