My b'day movie review - Akira (1988)

This is a movie I remember watching as a kid for the first time, couldn't have been older than 12 and re-watching it today made me understand that it might have been a bit inappropriate at the time.
Its a pretty graphic movie, being an anime and not that popular outside of Japan, I can understand that not many parents may have realized its content. Its not like I got scarred from it, but it sure had some influence on 12 year old me.

Here is a trailer to Akira:

Some info about the movie

Director: Katsuhiro Ôtomo (Before the movie he wrote the manga for Akira 1982-1990)
Writers (screenplay): Katsuhiro Ôtomo and Izô Hashimoto

This movie had the biggest budget for an anime ever; $10 million. (Spirited away took the record later with a budget of $19 million). Since it was one of the first animated movies for adults, it didn't do good outside of Japan and only grossed arund half a million $. It wasn't until later that the movie started doing really well in the early days of VHS since cinema tickets were only a quarter of the VHS price.

The manga went on for 6 volumes and the movie was released before the real story had even ended. A lot of people felt confused watching the movie, and many who read the manga didn't appreciate it as much since so much went missing and big parts of the stories weren't even brought up in the 2 h 5 min run time. In the movie they also don't mention much about the drug use which had a big part in the manga.

Production

It was also one of the first movies to have the dialogue and music produced before the animation. This caused voice actors to do a better job since the animation was created afterwards and could fit in better.
The film is comprised of over 160,000 single pictures and over 2,200 shots (24 fps), this amount is more than double from regular anime movies and is fully hand-drawn without CGI by 70 different animators working together with the director.
Akiras special cutscenes and many other parts of the movie were so revolutionary that many can still find them in newer Anime/Cartoons and even Movies. This imgur album shows a motorcycle sliding scene that was adapted by so many. (the last gif is the best one though :P)

Short description of the story-line (not much spoilers - just the start of the movie)

The movie opens up in 1988 and Tokyo is destroyed by a big explosion resulting in World War 3, while the main story happens 31 years later in Neo Tokyo. Kaneda is in a motor-gang and he joins his friend Tetsuo to go fight a rival gang they have cornered. After the battle Tetsuo fails to notice a kid standing in the middle of the road and drives his bike right into him, causing a huge explosion but somehow the kid remains unharmed. Shortly after the a military squad arrive, take the kid (who turns out to be an escaped government test-subject with psychic powers) and Tetsuo away and place Tetsuo in a hospital while the rest of the gang is interrogated by the police. Meanwhile at the hospital the doctors realize that Tetsuo also possesses psychic abilities similar to Akira (Akira was the child who caused the huge explosion in 1988 which started World War 3)

Image Source

Thoughts

After watching the movie a second time and reading some reviews and thoughts of other people. I can see the resemblance of the story to the real World War 2 and the anxiety and disorientation Japan suffered after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tetsuo's psychic abilities and really bizarre mutations could be compared to the deformations the Japanese suffered due to radiation poisoning from the atomic bombs. Having this in mind, Tetsuo's rapid evolution in power over a short time could also be compared to how quickly Japan turned from shambles into one of the most advanced economies in the world. With Japan having a big position amongst world powers, the movie seemed to portray the fear that remained that it would consume their cultural identity.

The movie is also known for starting a whole new genre called "body horror" which mixes the organic with the industrial, maybe out of fear of technology and how fast it was moving forward in newly re-built Japan. Most importantly though, it paved the way for Anime to the rest of the world and made it easier for anyone outside of Japan to access it and watch it bloom over the years.

Image Source

Akira is a really powerful movie and I recommend anyone to watch it at least once. Keeping in mind what I just told you about it I am sure you will enjoy it a bit more even though you haven't read the Manga. Re-watching it 15 years later felt like I was watching a whole new movie even though I remembered scenes from it, but was probably too young to understand it.

Oh and if you really can't stand watching anime, the movie was remade by fans and is surprisingly good considered! Here is the trailer to it.

This review was really fun to make and if people enjoy reading them it would awesome to watch more movies and review them! :) Thanks @royaltiffany for the contest and indirectly making me watch the movie again :D

While writing the review I thought I'd draw my next sketch at the same time, and got pretty excited to draw Akira, so here is the character Kaneda on his bike. ( took me around 4 hours to finish)