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. The movie was distributed by Streamline Pictures in North America. This dub is often incorrectly referred to as the "Streamline Dub" because of this, not helped by the fact that the voice cast largely consisted of regulars for Streamline's dubs.

In 2001, a new dub was produced by Animaze for Pioneer Entertainment's DVD release. The writers of this version of the dub went out of their way to make the script and story easier to understand, since one of the criticisms of the original dub was that the script was barely comprehensible.