Akira

1988. Movie. 124 min. Science fiction. org Katsuhiro Otomo (manga). dir Katushiro Otomo. scr Katsuhiro Otomo. mus Shoji Yamashiro. des Katsuhiro Otomo. -bc

Akira is a groundbreaking feature that showed the world that anime was more than just giant robots, space battleships, and Hello Kitty. A complex science fiction film with the production quality of a big-budget live-action film, it tells a hard-edged action-packed story with a warning about government secrecy, military ambitions, and disaffected youth.

In the year 2019 in Neo Tokyo, a reconstructed city built on the site of Tokyo after a mysterious explosion leveled the city thirty-one years earlier, the social order is becoming increasingly unstable. Teenage bikers led by high school delinquent Kaneda are in the middle of a rumble when one of the gang, Tetsuo, stumbles upon a strange child who is on the run from a secret government experiment. The military recaptures the child but also takes Tetsuo into custody and confines him to a government hospital. Kaneda allies with Kei, a teenage girl from the rebel group trying to free the children from the experiment, and joins the rebels in breaking into the lab where Tetsuo is being held. In the meantime, the police have their hands full with student riots and terrorist acts, all while the governing council is feuding with the military and the scientists in charge of the secret project.

Experiencing an onset of increased power, Tetsuo breaks out on his own and heads toward a secret site buried under the new Olympic Stadium that once housed the old Akira Project, a suppressed experiment designed to unleash dormant human powers that began with a single boy named Akira. Idolized by a religious cult calling him Akira and pursued by the military, Tetsuo allows only Kaneda to get close to him. But even Kaneda finds Tetsuo’s increasing megalomania impossible to reason with. Eventually Tetsuo releases the remnants of Akira and undergoes a monstrous transformation into a giant, growing blob-like creature that goes out of control, threatening Neo Tokyo with yet another apocalyptic finale.

Other sci-fi anime of the 1980s had depicted dystopian urban futures, but none were quite as detailed as Akira in re-creating the varied urban spaces of a rebuilt high-tech metropolis with strong traces of the old city remaining. The film relies on these locales for much of the dramatic imagery, whether it’s a rundown vocational high school, a series of elevated highways, the massive sewers running under the city, or the colossal Olympic Stadium that serves as the arena for the final confrontation. There are also frequent action scenes in these spaces, ranging from bike chases, shootouts, fistfights, and rumbles to military offensives, terrorist bombings, and Tetsuo’s climactic rampage of mass destruction. The frame count is high, the animation fluid, and the crowd scenes full.

One area that could have used a little more effort is that of character design. Otomo deliberately eschews the standard anime strategy of lightening the characters’ hair color or making characters blond or redheads to differentiate them. He’s one of very few animators who consciously strives to make his characters look Japanese. Commendable as that goal is, the result is that too many of the characters here look too much alike. The young people all seem to come out of the same mold and the adult figures all come out of a different mold. Some even wear the same moustache. The only character who really stands out in this regard is Tetsuo, who has a higher forehead, more expressive features, and a shorter, curlier haircut than the others. He also carries the emotional weight of the film, so he has to be a little more distinctive to be effective.

What attracted so much initial notice for Akira was the sheer scale of its production. With its magnificent cityscapes of gleaming Neo Tokyo set off by abandoned remnants of the old city and its sprawling action scenes involving hundreds of figures and dozens of vehicles in motion, Akira offered much more spectacle than had previously been seen on the anime screen. Costing approximately $10 million and shot on 70 mm film, it was the most expensive Japanese animated movie up to that time and was as technically polished as most live-action science fiction Hollywood films of the time. It certainly compared favorably to one of its own spiritual models, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), which had a similar setting and vaguely similar theme.

But Akira also had substance. While there had certainly been serious, well-crafted science fiction anime long before Akira, none took us so deeply inside the head of one of its protagonists, or worked out in such detail the complex interface of government, science, revolutionaries, and the military. We see the story largely from the viewpoints of delinquent bikers rather than those of cops or crimefighters, but we also see the entire context of the bikers’ alienation, from brutal teachers to squabbling government ministers to overwhelmed cops to the military commander trying to maintain control of it all. Society is breaking down and each faction’s response is at odds with everyone else’s. Akira weaves all these themes together to create a political, social, and cultural parable with powerful messages for the Japan of 1988.

Despite Akira’s extraordinary reputation, there has been constant grumbling about the comprehensibility of the story line. While it may not be easy to digest on a first screening, multiple viewings go a long way toward aiding one’s understanding and appreciation of this complex, multifaceted story that refuses to shy away from the full extent of its implications. The film’s messages can be interpreted in different ways, but one can certainly see in Otomo’s story a cautionary tale about Japan’s place in the global order at a time (the late 1980s) when its “economic miracle” was being reported with a mixture of awe and fear by the rest of the world. Perhaps Otomo is asking whether it was in Japan’s best interest to be a world power. Can power not be misused and turn back on itself? Can a nation that tries to bury its violent past afford to be so confident that history won’t repeat itself? Or will that violent past rear up, as the Akira Project does, to repeat the devastation it once caused?

Director Katsuhiro Otomo based the movie on his own manga series that was serialized in Young Magazine from 1982 to 1990. Prior to Akira, Otomo had directed the framing segments of Robot Carnival (1987) and “The Order to Stop Construction” in Neo-Tokyo (1987). He did not direct another full-length anime film until Steamboy (2004), but chiefly worked as a scriptwriter for anime such as Roujin Z (1991) and Metropolis (2001), and directed the live action film World Apartment Horror (1991).

An animation highlight of the film is the hallucination Tetsuo experiences in the hospital, in which he sees his childhood teddy bears crawl on his bed and talk to him and then grow huge to fill up the room, foreshadowing his own later metamorphosis.

The final shots of Tetsuo’s out-of-control metamorphosis, resulting from the “Akira” exposure, and his rapid growth into something massive, monstrous, and continually expanding, are easily the most memorable in the film, with a layer of poignance added by Tetsuo’s desperate cries for help addressed to his powerless buddy, Kaneda.

One interesting aspect of the film for observers of Japanese culture is the way the senior-junior relationship between Kaneda and Tetsuo is affected by the events in the story. Accustomed to the respect that a junior is supposed to show his sempai (a term for someone of superior status, an upperclassman or elder) Kaneda is outraged when Tetsuo, in the flush of his new superpowers, defies Kaneda and mocks him. In an amusing twist, Kaneda seems less concerned with Tetsuo’s increasingly horrific condition than with the violation of this entrenched code of behavior.

The character of Tetsuo served as one of the inspirations for filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto when he made Tetsuo: Iron Man (1988) and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992), anime-inspired live-action films with an edgy cyberpunk theme about humans, machines, metal, and metamorphosis.

violence Brutal beatings with bloodshed, shootings, and explosions. profanity Prevalent.