Akira: Sub or Which Dub?
Akira has two English dubs: Streamline's original and the 2001 Pioneer dub recorded at Animaze. Both casts, what two ANN critics heard, and which releases carry which track.
Akira has two English dubs, and choosing between them matters as much as the usual sub-or-dub question. Streamline Pictures recorded the first for the film's original American release. Pioneer commissioned the second for its restored 2001 edition, and Anime News Network's encyclopedia credits that one to Animaze. The Japanese track is the 1988 original. Funimation's 25th Anniversary Edition put all three on one set, and the ANN critic who reviewed it graded the English and Japanese versions the same.
The short answer
For English, start with the 2001 dub: it was made from a new translation, Bamboo Dong graded it A, and Theron Martin, who heard both dubs, judged it the more accurate of the two. Choose the Streamline dub if you first saw the film on VHS, or if you prefer looser, more colloquial lines. Choose the Japanese track if you want the performances the animation was drawn to. Theron Martin's review notes that Akira is one of the rare anime where the dialogue was recorded first and the lip movements animated around it, as American animated films usually do it.
Who made each track
ANN dates the Japanese premiere to July 16, 1988. Its encyclopedia credits the Streamline dub's direction to Wally Burr and Sheldon Renan, with L. Michael Haller on the adaptation, and the 2001 dub's direction to Kevin Seymour, who wrote its English screenplay with Heidi Wilbur. Pioneer's press release, which ANN reprinted in May 2001, says the company spent $1 million restoring the film and that "a new English dub was created from a new translation of the original Japanese script." The same report noted that Pioneer's DVD did not include the Streamline dub.
| Character | Japanese | Streamline dub | 2001 dub |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shōtarō Kaneda | Mitsuo Iwata | Jimmy Flinders | Johnny Yong Bosch |
| Tetsuo Shima | Nozomu Sasaki | Stanley Gurd Jr. | Joshua Seth |
| The Colonel | Tarō Ishida | Tony Pope | James Lyon |
| Kiyoko | Sachie Itō | Melora Harte | Sandy Fox |
| Kai | Takeshi Kusao | Bob Bergen | Tony Sarducci |
ANN credits Mami Koyama as Kei in Japanese and Deanna Morris in the Streamline dub; it also lists Wendee Lee as Kei without saying which dub, so that credit is left out of the table. Tony Pope doubled heavily for Streamline: ANN credits him with the Colonel, Nezu and Yamagata.
What the reviewers heard
Bamboo Dong reviewed Pioneer's limited-edition DVD and told fans who remembered the old version that "the English track has been newly recorded with different voice actors." Dong found that the English dialogue "sticks very close to the English translation" and that the cast pronounced the Japanese names correctly, including Akira's own, and graded the dub A and the subtitled version A-. The review covers the two-disc set.
Theron Martin's December 2013 review of Funimation's set heard both dubs side by side. He judged the 2001 dub "certainly more accurate, both in terms of translation and matching up with the lip flaps," and credited it with fixing errors such as a "centrifuge on level 6" that became "level 7 capsules." He also found it "a little too accurate" at times, with lines that sound more awkward than the freer original. His example is one of Kaneda's lines:
Streamline: "Just when my coil's reaching the green line!"2001: "Ah, damn it! And my motor coils were just getting warmed up."
Martin asked which one sounds more like a biker punk and left the answer to the viewer. He graded the dub and the sub A- each; his dub grade covers a disc with both English tracks.
Which release carries which dub
Pioneer's 2001 special edition has the Japanese track and the 2001 dub only. ANN reported in August 2013 that Funimation's 25th Anniversary Edition would include "both the Streamline and Pioneer English dubs as well as the original Japanese language track with subtitles." Martin confirmed both dubs on the disc, and noted that some of Pioneer's extras, including the capsule mode that translated on-screen writing, did not carry over. ANN's report on Funimation's 2020 4K release does not list the disc's audio tracks, so check the packaging of any later edition before assuming the Streamline track is there.
Bandai Entertainment’s North American Blu-ray from 2009 sits between those releases. ANN’s 2008 report on the disc lists the Japanese soundtrack in Dolby TrueHD 5.1 at 24-bit/192 kHz and “The English soundtrack” in 5.1. The report does not say which dub that is, or whether the disc carries both, so this page does not assign one.
A note on quoting
The lines on our Akira quotes page are checked against English transcriptions, and this page does not assign any of them to a particular dub or subtitle track. Martin's Kaneda example shows how far apart the two English scripts can be. The ending explainer covers the finale, with spoilers, and the manga catalog page lists Kodansha's English volumes of the much longer original.