Here’s the text version of my review of Akira for Geekvolution’s Anime Rewind.
ANIME REWIND: AKIRA (1988)
Akira opens famously with an image of a seemingly nuclear explosion engulfing the city around it. This happens silently, making it all the more unnerving. That moment is oddly enough is a good metaphor for how this film changed culture.
Every so often a film comes along and changes everything. 2001 opened our minds on what a sci-fi film can say, Jaws changed the way Hollywood put out summer movies, and Scream exposed horror fans to a generation of annoyingly ironic slasher films.
Akira fits that distinction for anime, helping create the anime fandom into what we see today. Back in the late 80's. Anime or Japanmation as it was once called...yuck, was a small cult following. Yes, back in MY day, you would have to walk through 30 miles of snow to your local video store in hopes of finding any VHS of badly dubbed film that wasn't already stolen by some other desperate fan. You might get lucky and turn on the last twenty minutes of a movie on HBO, you had no idea what it was, but you knew it was Japanese!
So, when Akira was released in select theaters in the United States, it was like a quiet bomb dropping in the geek culture.
Akira was based on the manga of the same name that ran in the pages of Young Magazine from 1982 to 1990. Creator, Katsuhiro Otomo directed the movie himself to ensure that the movie would remain as close as possible to the source material. Good idea since the story is around TWO THOUSAND PAGES and wasn't even completed by the time production started on the film. And Zack Snyder thought Watchmen was a challenge!
It takes place 31 years after World War III, Neo Tokyo is once again becoming a powder cake. The city is set to host the Olympics the next year and there are increased tensions all over the place. The anti-government protesters fight the military and the police. Fringe religious cults predict the return of Akira, a messianic figure shrouded in mystery. All we know is that he was a test subject of the Japanese government that started the war. He was among a small group of kids that were tested on with Takashi, Masaru, and Kayoko. I get the feeling that the following three are split on what path to follow. On one hand they took part in the event that caused the war, but Takashi is tired of being a ward or prisoner of the state. They're all adults stuck in children's bodies being treated like children. All of them expect the most powerful of them, Akira to return and take them away. When will this happen is even beyond their knowledge.
Colonel Shikishima is committed to keeping a lid on everything. He is willing to work within the confines of Democracy. That is until it becomes obvious to him that the counsel is a mess of corruption and bickering. These men in charge are unable to have a reasonable discussion with any compromise. Keeping the peace looks impossible at this point. He doesn't have to have psychic powers to know that Neo Tokyo is on a collision course with wackyness. He soon realizes that there's a mole within the government trying to bring Akira back, Nezu.
Nezu is on the counsel. He remembers the world before the war and he's a true believer in Akira. He wishes that his return will usher in a new age of enlightenment free of the chaos. He uses his political power to bring about his goals. He, like many others believe that Akira processed power that all humans have deep down inside their DNA. He'll get his wish, but not in the way he had hoped.
Everything is set into motion when Takeashi has a run in with a young gang member, Tetsuo. Tetsuo and Kaneda are the lead characters of the film. In their biker gang, Kaneda is the leader of the pack and Tetsuo is more or less his sidekick. He's not even all that respected in the group.
Kaneda couldn't care less about the world around because it hasn't given him any reason to care. He was raised in some state run orphanage and shuffled off into a hell hole of a school in one of Japan's ghettos. He only fights for himself and his position of gang leader. He treats his friend, Tetsuo like some lacky. He comes across as a-moral since he doesn't seem interested in the damage done in his gang's war with rival gang, The Clowns. No! That's the Jokers! Not the Clowns! There! Better.
Riding fast bikes, hooking up with the ladies, and fighting the Clowns is his entire world. He barely even notices the political struggles going on around him until it invades his life.
In the middle of battling their rivals, the Clowns, they run into Takashi, that was escaping from a government research project. He was sprung by a agent of a anti-government group lead by Ryu and Kei. Tetsuo's nearly runs into Takashi with his bike. In lashing out of Tetsuo, he mistakenly unlocks latent psychic abilities that were hidden deep within young biker. How? Ummmmm. LOOK AT THAT EXPLOSION!
Tetsuo is taken by the government, placed under observation and research. He's given drugs to partially suppress his new abilities. However, he soon escapes, in a quest to figure out what has happened to him. With Tetsuo taken by the government, Kaneda teams up with the anti-government group along side of Kei.
Kei is a believer in tearing down the government. She follows her brother, Ryu right into the heart of darkness. You get the feeling that she is still young and her vision is about to tested. She discovers that she will kill for her beliefs, but it's obvious that she's unsure how far she'll go to reach her goals. She fears the danger of what Akira and the other experiment pose, but her eyes are opened when the Test Children choose her as their pawn, granting her the power to face Tetsuo. Like Kaneda, her world view expands.
After meeting the three remaining test subjects from 30 years earlier, he learns about Akira and the other children were experiments of the government to increase psychic power that could lie within all people. Tetsuo has already become more powerful than the test kids, he fears that only the great and powerful Akira might be the only one that prevents him from becoming king of the mountain.
Tetsuo comes around to not liking being the butt of everyone's joke and maybe taking life's droppings isn't all it cracked up to be. He's had enough of the being a captive and test subject of the government and having painful visions of Akira ring through his head, he breaks out of the government. What follows is a rampage that makes Carrie White's Prom Night look like Teen Witch's Prom. As he rips apart the city, killing all in his way. It doesn't matter if they're the army, bystanders, or even friends. He's come to realize that he's the new God of this world and like old street gang rules apply, he's gonna take out the toughest one on the block, Akira.
Obsessed with finding him, Tetsuo marches through Neo Tokyo leaving countless bodies in his wake. Once Tetsuo reaches the lab where Akira is being kept, he discovers that he is in fact dead, who's remains are now kept in a series of jars to be studied. What follows is a confrontation with Kaneda and the military, lasers, and satellites.
Some viewers have been confused over the fact that Kaneda can even challenge Tetsuo with the same laser rifle that was useless during the bridge scene. That's where the emotion of Tetsuo's previous life comes into play. Tetsuo. Like Kaneda, was dropped into a institution without those to care for him. Both of them fell through the cracks of this society. Unlike Kaneda, Tetsuo wasn't as tough. This caused to seek Kaneda as a protector, an older brother that he never had. While a love exists between them, it's obvious that he's the weaker of the two, the younger brother, the sidekick. At the beginning of the film, we see that their relationship had developed a level of hostility from Kaneda's end. I'm guessing that he's done with being Tetsuo's bodyguard of sorts. Kaneda hopes that this can give him time to psych out Tetsuo enough to defeat him. Unfortunately for him, the gun's battery wasn't up to the job.
This all doesn't last in Tetsuo's favor for long. In one the battles with the military, he loses an arm and replaces it with a makeshift arm created from whatever machinery lying around. Soon, the arm takes on a life of it's own in what can be called a level of epic body horror. This is only the beginning of him losing control of these powers. He transforms into this giant blob. Meanwhile, the three children resurrect Akira, who engulfs Tetsuo in some sort of cosmic rebirth! Thus taking Tetsuo and the children with him. Where did they go? What will become of Kaneda, Kei, and the people of Neo Toyko? Will Japan be ready for the 2019 Olympics??
I'm guessing no on that last question.
Keep in mind, when Otomo first began work on Akira in the early 80's, Japan was on top of the world. It's economy was reviling the US. This was after years of rebuilding the nation after WW II. This film deals with a Japan of the future successfully rebuilding after a devastating war and is now a commanding force in the world. Just slightly under the surface is a power structure barely holding on with a nation tearing at itself through political unrest and religious fanaticism. The upper class seems to be doing great while those on the bottom suffer in run down neighborhoods and school long since cared for by a growing corrupt and feuding government. Was he warning Japan or predicting America's future?
In the film, Tetsuo and Kaneda seem to represent different aspects of Japan at the time. Kaneda is someone that couldn't care less about the past or future and lives only in the now without regard on how it affects the world around him. Tetsuo is someone that gets caught up in gaining more power without thinking about the dangers.
Like I mentioned before, the manga this film was based on was thousands of pages long, it has a massive cast with a number of story lines going on at once. Kaneda isn't exactly the lead, he's only one of the major characters of the series. Otomo had to decide what to focus on with the movie. Instead of trying to squeeze the story into a two hour epic, he went with adapting the first quarter of the story with Kaneda and Tetsuo taking center stage.
Does this work? Well, there are some issues with this choice. This sadly leaves supporting characters from the manga in bit parts. Lady Miyako is the biggest example of this. She is a fairly important figure in the manga, but is only one of the many bystanders killed during the bridge battle. That and she's voiced as a male in a number of the dubs.
It's also easy for the plot to leave first time viewers behind. There's a lot of backstory and how it connects with the events of the film, it does require repeat viewings. The good news that the information is there and the filmmakers do know what's going on. I tend to think of this much like The Shinning film, it narrows it's focus and leaves some mystery for the audience, but still manages to be a provocative work on it's own.
Akira is one of those important films that changed cinema whether you like the actual movie or not. You can't remove Akira from the timeline without causing a huge hole in anime in Japan and all over the world. The film still stands up today with it's detailed animation and thought provoking storyline. However, some will get lost in it's plot that sometimes gets a bit too fast paced for it's own good.
I recommend it to anime fans new and old. I'm giving Akira 4 and half stars out of 5.
“NEXT TIME ON ANIME REWIND...Dragonball Z: Dead Zone!
