Joseph Luster
September 10, 2017 
New Theatrical Movie Initial D Legend 1: Awakening is the first in a trilogy of anime films that retells the early chapters of Shuichi Shigeno’s Initial D manga. Sentai Filmworks previously announced plans to bring the films to North America, and those plans have been expanded with a theatrical screening.
The first movie is set to debut with English subtitles at this year’s Los Angeles Anime Film Festival (LA-AFF) on Saturday, September 16 at 4:30pm Pacific Time. Tickets will go on sale on the official site soon.
Here’s how Sentai describes it:
The first in the new Initial D Legend theatrical trilogy is a bold retelling of the early stages of Shuichi Shigeno’s long-running manga. The film begins with when aspiring racer Koichiro Iketani witnesses an unplanned street duel between Keisuke Takahashi, a member of a rival race team, and a mysterious Toyota Sprinter Trueno AE86. What Koichiro doesn’t know is that the driver is fellow gas station attendant Takumi Fujiwara, who was making a late-night tofu delivery for his father, a legendary Mt. Akina driver himself. Unforeseen events are about to springboard Takumi into the center of the street-racing world, turning the rivalry between Iketani’s Akina Speedsters and Takahashi’s Akagi Red Suns into an all-out street war! The legendary series that introduced the west to the sport of drift racing is reinvented in an all new feature film that’s even faster and more furious than ever before.
