From: dododge@wam.umd.edu (David O. Dodge)
Subject: Re: Akira CAV LD is out!
Summary: quick review
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1992 22:35:09 GMT

In article <40540@sdcc12.ucsd.edu> smah@sdcc13.ucsd.edu (Steve Mah) writes:
>
>... the store was closed at the time so I couldn't take a
>look to see what the extras were specifically 8-(  I know I don't
>even have to ask, but when someone picks this up, can you post a
>review?

Here's a brief run-down of what's included. I haven't watched much of the film
yet but took a look at most of the supplements last night.

It comes in a tri-fold package rather than a box. The packaging has some
pictures and pencil tests on it inside. The only paper supplement
is a single-sheet note describing the transfer and stating that they misspelled
"manga" as "magna" pretty much everywhere :-).

It's 5 sides, all CAV. Pressed by >3M< (looks like their getting their
reputation back). Sides 1-4 are just the movie, and side 5 has the last
10 minutes or so of the film and a wealth of supplemental material, including:
   - Japanese trailer
   - US trailier
   - First issue of US comic
   - thousands (yes, thousands) of original pencil tests and drawings
   - storyboards
   - information about sound, coloring, and other stuff in the form
     of interviews (culled from the "Akira Production Report" perhaps?)

The film contains the English soundtrack on the digital tracks and the
Japanese soundtrack on the analog tracks. There are no subtitles and I
see no indication of CC encoding (no surprise considering this is Criterion).
The film is letterboxed at supposedly 1.85:1 (so sayeth the liner notes, but
I haven't measured it myself). From what I've seen, the print quality appears
good. The Japanese audio tracks are discernably lower in volume than the
English tracks.

It turns out the first issue of the US comic is included *twice* in the
supplements. Once in the form of single-frame shots of the pages from
that issue (some select pages from other issues are also included), and
again in the form of a "readable" version, with full-screen blowups of
the panels and variuos fade/sweep/slide transitions between them.
The "readable" version is very nice -- you push "play" to go to the next
shot, and it might pan across a wide panel, or slide up a tall panel, or
zoom in on a dialogue balloon, or the next set of panels may "move in"
from all directions. The transitions generally follow what's going on in
the panels, so that if an explosion occurs the transition to the next
panel may be a split/zoom kind of effect with a white flash :-).

Criterion has tried out a new thing in the supplements where they use a
"page turn" effect to go from the title of the supplement chapter to the
first frame of text. It looks like this was done by doing some serious
playing with the white flags (i.e. pushing "next frame" actually gives you
animation). It doesn't work right on the Pioneer x80 series, but you can
compensate by pushing "play" instead of "step" (this is noted in the liner
notes). Once I got the hang of what was going on, my 3080 handled it just
fine.

IMO it's a real shame this wasn't subtitled as well (in the black bands
of course). This is the first time I've seen it with the original Japanese
dialogue and the difference is striking (the Japanese voices and lipsync
are MUCH better than the English ones)

                                             -Dave Dodge/dododge@wam.umd.edu