Top 25 Favourite Films: #6 Akira (Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988)
#6. Akira. Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988.
There is no film like Akira. A full three decades on, it still towers above the anime genre, and over the entire animated cinema medium, a tale of apocalypse and otherworldly powers and Japanese motorcycle gangs that feels like the practical epicentre, the collision point with the Western World of a visual that over the last thirty years has come to rival, if not eclipse, at least in terms of print media, Marvel and DC, that of Japanese anime and manga. Hell, to a certain extent, for a certain generation, Akira, and the films, series, and Original Video Animations (or OVA) released between the turn of the decade, and the arrival of that other great moment of anime's validation, in the form of globe-conquering videogame franchise, Pokémon, in 1998, are anime in all its rich tapestry, and for them, this ultra-violent, joyfully vulgar, and occasionally pornographic heyday, launched by Akira, is long since passed. Akira is an epoch on celluloid.
It is, however, more than this; it is a veritable cultural titan, stretching out from its place in 80s and early 90s culture to everywhere, from Kanye West's Stronger, a celebration of the film that feels, in the continuing chaos of a twenty year process, as close as we will ever get to a western adaption, to Kaneda's iconic bike, and its equally iconic skid that's turned up, between the two of them, in everything from The Clone Wars to Ready Player One. Akira's iconography, its visuals, are, alongside the almost ridiculously long DragonBall/DragonBall Z, and of course the work of Hayao Miyazaki perhaps the most influential works of the medium.
For my part, Akira was perhaps the first series, my first major brush with the medium, after, of course, those twin monster-meets-kid series of the 1990s, Pokémon and digital-pet origining copycat-cum-weirder younger brother, Digimon. I, however, at this point unaware of the history of the medium, or, indeed, taste-one of the first series I can remember watching is Gilgamesh, an, in hindsight, dark and impressively bleak science fiction series-started with the manga, also penned by Otomo, between 1982 and 1990, not finishing until after the film itself had reached American shores.
Whilst they share much in common, from protagonists Tetsuo and Kaneda to the general narrative-the film, in essence, is a distillation of the first two and a bit volumes (still numbering over a thousand pages), with a radically different ending, a reasonably common practise in adaptions of manga into anime series and films, the difference is stark.
Where the film essentially ends, the manga ploughs on into post-apocalyptic imagery, with Tetsuo, the series deuteragonist , a former member of a bike gang that also includes protagonist Kaneda, who eventually becomes a terrifyingly powerful if unstable psychic, running the Great Tokyo Empire, as an ever increasing number of factions trying to destroy him and the horrifyingly powerful telekinetic enfant terriblé, Akira. Yet, whilst the manga is, arguably, one of the medium's finest moments, a two-thousand page masterclass from one of the best artists in the business, it is forever, and rightfully overshadowed, by its animated adaption.
Akira begins with utter destruction; as with a great number of Japan's most famous work, the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hang over the work, both in the anime and the manga, (Otomo having been born less than a decade after the atomic bomb attacks). Yet, there is a strange beauty to it, with the camera slowly panning up across the city, before the colossal explosion rises across Tokyo, destroying everything in its wake. From the destruction, we cut to 2019, Neo-Tokyo risem from the ashes and our title is revealed to ominous drums. The soundtrack for Akira, by the by, composed by Shoji Yamashiro, is one of my favourite soundtracks ever, heavily led by percussion, and influenced by everything from the music that accompanies Noh theatre to Indonesian gamelan music, and performed by colossal Japanese music collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi.
From here, we are introduced to Shōtarō Kaneda and Tetsuo Shima, and the run-down, grungy dystopian world of Neo-Tokyo, a mixture of Japan in the early 1980s and indeed in the decades previously, the nascent cyberpunk genre (Blade Runner and William Gibson's Neuromancer both clearly influences on the manga run of Akira, and reflected here in this overly Japanese future). Over thirty years later, nothing, save for Dennis Villeneuve's underrated sequel to Blade Runner itself manages to look this effortlessly futuristic, a mixture of neons and colossal glass-fronted buildings, and rebellious violent streetgangs and brewing discord among the undertrodden and increasingly combative populace.
Kaneda, for his part, is a likable protagonist, a wild, if essentially good young man, who lives for his bike, his freedom and, eventually, his relationship with Kei. He is every inch the anti-hero, brash and carefree, though the film does play him a little closer to the typical shonen hero of works like Naruto and Bleach, rather than the occasionally violent if well intentioned figure of the manga. Tetsuo, in comparison, is, from the beginning of the film, a figure in Kaneda's shadow-we first see him coveting Kaneda's iconic red bike, a runtish figure whose arrogance, and chip on his shoulder, is palpable and his collision with a mysterious figure, and unlocking of his psychic powers sets him on a collision course with Kaneda, and the mysterious Kei.
Where Akira is strongest is in its action scenes-the opening bike scene is still as exhilarating as it is today, where Otomo's artwork best translates, particularly in the "chicken" sequence between Kaneda and rival bike gang leader, Clown, to moving, and incredibly stylish image, the iconic trails of tail-light after-image adding a viseral sense of speed to these sequences. Off the bikes, Akira is almost viscerally violent-there are too many sequences to name to show the film's use of violence, not for effect, but to show just how run-down and dystopian this world is, from the protector of mysterious psychic child, Takashi, being brutally gunned down in impressively visceral fashion, to any one of the shots of police against protestors, including one memorable shot where a protester is indiscriminately shot with a smoke-grenade.
These opening fifteen minutes essentially set the scene perfectly for Akira-Tetsuo is soon found to have latent psychic abilities, similar to that of the infamous Akira (one of the biggest differences between manga and anime, in fact, is the very existence of Akira himself, vivisected in the film whilst very much alive in the manga), and begins to be a threat. Kei and Kaneda's gang manage to get out of police custody, and Kaneda finds himself slowly drawn into the conflict between the espers and the Colonel-essentially the face of the military within Akira and the increasingly powerful and erratic Tetsuo.
With Tetsuo's rampage through the city intersecting with both increasing protests and a brutally nasty government coup enroute to finding Akira himself, including murdering his former comrade, Yamagata, so Kei and Kaneda are slowly forced into opposing the increasingly powerful psychic, leading to the infamous, nay, iconic showdown between the two former friends, in which, at least in the English dub, leads to Tetsuo laying out his grievances, only for Kaneda to remind him, via perhaps the most famous line in the entire English dub ("That's Mister Kaneda to you, punk") exactly where his place on the pecking order is. This, of course, eventually backfires, with Kaneda forced to flee when the military get involved
This, of course, leads to perhaps one of the most iconic scenes in anime. With Tetsuo badly injured, his psychic powers flaring out of control, and a final battle with Kaneda pushing him over the edge, so he eventually transforms into one of cinema's most disturbing monsters ever, a visually disturbing moment of power-run-rampant, Tetsuo's hubris and power overwhelming him, until he becomes a visually disturbing, utterly terrifying-looking amorphous blob, an all-encompassing mass of ameboid flesh and metal that feels like it represents everything from the aftermath of nuclear war to mankind's relationship with power to, simply, horror incarnate. Akira appears, for perhaps three or four seconds, not as nuclear menace, but all cleansing fire, an atomic white-out of destruction that destroys evertthing in its path.
Following one final reunion of Kaneda and Tetsuo, focusing upon their childhood, so Otomo turns to destruction on grand scale once more, a rebirth out of the colossal destructive force of Akira and Tetsuo. And out of this destruction, even as a ruined Tokyo floods, and Kaneda and Kei head for safety, so Otomo has one final twist, neatly presented as a symbolic reunion between Kaneda and Tetsuo, with the esper having disappeared into another plane of reality, perhaps now far beyond human itself.
How does one talk about Akira? Its reputation does not so much precede it as surround it, colossal and almost all encompassing-this after all, is the West's first brush with the medium, for many people still the yardstick for the genre, and its impact upon animation, upon the nascent cyberpunk genre, upon science-fiction, hell, upon the entire comic and film-making and geek world, is immeasurable. I could list for page upon page the works that have taken influence, visual, conceptual or otherwise, from Akira-alongside 1995's Ghost in the Shell, a comparatively small-scale and much denser work, augmented by half a dozen extra works in the years subsequent, it is arguably the most influential work from the medium
Akira simply put, is a masterpiece-even though the English dub is available in not one but two versions, even though in places Akira's age occasionally peeks through, even though its an incomplete adaption of a triple-decker thick manga that goes on to eventually have a longer, and more satisfying ending that the film only hints at, even though this film never actually made profit in its native Japan, it is the monolithic centre of modern anime. It is inescapable, still visually stunning, still, in the Japan of the hawkish Abe, in the shadow of the 2020 Olympics that forms part of Akira's final setpiece and plot, prescient. Akira still matters, still feels important, still feels revolutionary.
There is no film like Akira. A full three decades on, it still towers above the anime genre, and over the entire animated cinema medium, a tale of apocalypse and otherworldly powers and Japanese motorcycle gangs that feels like the practical epicentre, the collision point with the Western World of a visual that over the last thirty years has come to rival, if not eclipse, at least in terms of print media, Marvel and DC, that of Japanese anime and manga. Hell, to a certain extent, for a certain generation, Akira, and the films, series, and Original Video Animations (or OVA) released between the turn of the decade, and the arrival of that other great moment of anime's validation, in the form of globe-conquering videogame franchise, Pokémon, in 1998, are anime in all its rich tapestry, and for them, this ultra-violent, joyfully vulgar, and occasionally pornographic heyday, launched by Akira, is long since passed. Akira is an epoch on celluloid.
It is, however, more than this; it is a veritable cultural titan, stretching out from its place in 80s and early 90s culture to everywhere, from Kanye West's Stronger, a celebration of the film that feels, in the continuing chaos of a twenty year process, as close as we will ever get to a western adaption, to Kaneda's iconic bike, and its equally iconic skid that's turned up, between the two of them, in everything from The Clone Wars to Ready Player One. Akira's iconography, its visuals, are, alongside the almost ridiculously long DragonBall/DragonBall Z, and of course the work of Hayao Miyazaki perhaps the most influential works of the medium.
For my part, Akira was perhaps the first series, my first major brush with the medium, after, of course, those twin monster-meets-kid series of the 1990s, Pokémon and digital-pet origining copycat-cum-weirder younger brother, Digimon. I, however, at this point unaware of the history of the medium, or, indeed, taste-one of the first series I can remember watching is Gilgamesh, an, in hindsight, dark and impressively bleak science fiction series-started with the manga, also penned by Otomo, between 1982 and 1990, not finishing until after the film itself had reached American shores.
Whilst they share much in common, from protagonists Tetsuo and Kaneda to the general narrative-the film, in essence, is a distillation of the first two and a bit volumes (still numbering over a thousand pages), with a radically different ending, a reasonably common practise in adaptions of manga into anime series and films, the difference is stark.
Where the film essentially ends, the manga ploughs on into post-apocalyptic imagery, with Tetsuo, the series deuteragonist , a former member of a bike gang that also includes protagonist Kaneda, who eventually becomes a terrifyingly powerful if unstable psychic, running the Great Tokyo Empire, as an ever increasing number of factions trying to destroy him and the horrifyingly powerful telekinetic enfant terriblé, Akira. Yet, whilst the manga is, arguably, one of the medium's finest moments, a two-thousand page masterclass from one of the best artists in the business, it is forever, and rightfully overshadowed, by its animated adaption.
Akira begins with utter destruction; as with a great number of Japan's most famous work, the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hang over the work, both in the anime and the manga, (Otomo having been born less than a decade after the atomic bomb attacks). Yet, there is a strange beauty to it, with the camera slowly panning up across the city, before the colossal explosion rises across Tokyo, destroying everything in its wake. From the destruction, we cut to 2019, Neo-Tokyo risem from the ashes and our title is revealed to ominous drums. The soundtrack for Akira, by the by, composed by Shoji Yamashiro, is one of my favourite soundtracks ever, heavily led by percussion, and influenced by everything from the music that accompanies Noh theatre to Indonesian gamelan music, and performed by colossal Japanese music collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi.
From here, we are introduced to Shōtarō Kaneda and Tetsuo Shima, and the run-down, grungy dystopian world of Neo-Tokyo, a mixture of Japan in the early 1980s and indeed in the decades previously, the nascent cyberpunk genre (Blade Runner and William Gibson's Neuromancer both clearly influences on the manga run of Akira, and reflected here in this overly Japanese future). Over thirty years later, nothing, save for Dennis Villeneuve's underrated sequel to Blade Runner itself manages to look this effortlessly futuristic, a mixture of neons and colossal glass-fronted buildings, and rebellious violent streetgangs and brewing discord among the undertrodden and increasingly combative populace.
Kaneda, for his part, is a likable protagonist, a wild, if essentially good young man, who lives for his bike, his freedom and, eventually, his relationship with Kei. He is every inch the anti-hero, brash and carefree, though the film does play him a little closer to the typical shonen hero of works like Naruto and Bleach, rather than the occasionally violent if well intentioned figure of the manga. Tetsuo, in comparison, is, from the beginning of the film, a figure in Kaneda's shadow-we first see him coveting Kaneda's iconic red bike, a runtish figure whose arrogance, and chip on his shoulder, is palpable and his collision with a mysterious figure, and unlocking of his psychic powers sets him on a collision course with Kaneda, and the mysterious Kei.
Where Akira is strongest is in its action scenes-the opening bike scene is still as exhilarating as it is today, where Otomo's artwork best translates, particularly in the "chicken" sequence between Kaneda and rival bike gang leader, Clown, to moving, and incredibly stylish image, the iconic trails of tail-light after-image adding a viseral sense of speed to these sequences. Off the bikes, Akira is almost viscerally violent-there are too many sequences to name to show the film's use of violence, not for effect, but to show just how run-down and dystopian this world is, from the protector of mysterious psychic child, Takashi, being brutally gunned down in impressively visceral fashion, to any one of the shots of police against protestors, including one memorable shot where a protester is indiscriminately shot with a smoke-grenade.
These opening fifteen minutes essentially set the scene perfectly for Akira-Tetsuo is soon found to have latent psychic abilities, similar to that of the infamous Akira (one of the biggest differences between manga and anime, in fact, is the very existence of Akira himself, vivisected in the film whilst very much alive in the manga), and begins to be a threat. Kei and Kaneda's gang manage to get out of police custody, and Kaneda finds himself slowly drawn into the conflict between the espers and the Colonel-essentially the face of the military within Akira and the increasingly powerful and erratic Tetsuo.
With Tetsuo's rampage through the city intersecting with both increasing protests and a brutally nasty government coup enroute to finding Akira himself, including murdering his former comrade, Yamagata, so Kei and Kaneda are slowly forced into opposing the increasingly powerful psychic, leading to the infamous, nay, iconic showdown between the two former friends, in which, at least in the English dub, leads to Tetsuo laying out his grievances, only for Kaneda to remind him, via perhaps the most famous line in the entire English dub ("That's Mister Kaneda to you, punk") exactly where his place on the pecking order is. This, of course, eventually backfires, with Kaneda forced to flee when the military get involved
This, of course, leads to perhaps one of the most iconic scenes in anime. With Tetsuo badly injured, his psychic powers flaring out of control, and a final battle with Kaneda pushing him over the edge, so he eventually transforms into one of cinema's most disturbing monsters ever, a visually disturbing moment of power-run-rampant, Tetsuo's hubris and power overwhelming him, until he becomes a visually disturbing, utterly terrifying-looking amorphous blob, an all-encompassing mass of ameboid flesh and metal that feels like it represents everything from the aftermath of nuclear war to mankind's relationship with power to, simply, horror incarnate. Akira appears, for perhaps three or four seconds, not as nuclear menace, but all cleansing fire, an atomic white-out of destruction that destroys evertthing in its path.
Following one final reunion of Kaneda and Tetsuo, focusing upon their childhood, so Otomo turns to destruction on grand scale once more, a rebirth out of the colossal destructive force of Akira and Tetsuo. And out of this destruction, even as a ruined Tokyo floods, and Kaneda and Kei head for safety, so Otomo has one final twist, neatly presented as a symbolic reunion between Kaneda and Tetsuo, with the esper having disappeared into another plane of reality, perhaps now far beyond human itself.
How does one talk about Akira? Its reputation does not so much precede it as surround it, colossal and almost all encompassing-this after all, is the West's first brush with the medium, for many people still the yardstick for the genre, and its impact upon animation, upon the nascent cyberpunk genre, upon science-fiction, hell, upon the entire comic and film-making and geek world, is immeasurable. I could list for page upon page the works that have taken influence, visual, conceptual or otherwise, from Akira-alongside 1995's Ghost in the Shell, a comparatively small-scale and much denser work, augmented by half a dozen extra works in the years subsequent, it is arguably the most influential work from the medium
Akira simply put, is a masterpiece-even though the English dub is available in not one but two versions, even though in places Akira's age occasionally peeks through, even though its an incomplete adaption of a triple-decker thick manga that goes on to eventually have a longer, and more satisfying ending that the film only hints at, even though this film never actually made profit in its native Japan, it is the monolithic centre of modern anime. It is inescapable, still visually stunning, still, in the Japan of the hawkish Abe, in the shadow of the 2020 Olympics that forms part of Akira's final setpiece and plot, prescient. Akira still matters, still feels important, still feels revolutionary.
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