hirty-one years after World War III, a shattered Toyko has been structurally rebuilt. But the human element is still severely fragmented, as feuding bike gangs rule the streets, feuding government officials vie for power, riots and terrorist activity skyrocket, and apocalyptic cults foretell the coming of Akira -- and of doomsday.
Writer/designer/director/artist Katsuhiro Otomo brought all these elements together in a single freak accident in his 2,000-page manga mega-epic Akira. His ambitious two-hour film adaptation not only broke new ground in his native Japan, it began the anime craze that continues to peak in America.
Akira opens with two packs of bike-punks beating each other senseless in a series of high-speed, ultra-violent confrontations along Tokyo's old, shattered highways. The combat ends abruptly as one gang's most fragile and put-upon member, Tetsuo, has an abrupt and shattering encounter with a strange, frightened, blue-skinned child. The Army immediately whisks the badly wounded Tetsuo away, leaving his best friend, gang leader Kaneda, to try to track his friend through the baffling depths of a world of politics, terrorism and ideological warfare. Tetsuo, meanwhile, is losing his mind as he struggles with newfound powers far beyond his moral or emotional control.
It all has something to do with the mysterious Akira, with technology that's growing faster than humanity's ability to control it, and with the inevitability of fate, as obscured events from the past converge on inevitable events in the future.
The watermark for serious anime
No other anime film has ever merged complex politics, high-speed action, and abstract humanist philosophy as successfully as Akira. As it approaches its 10-year-anniversary, it remains the watermark by which all serious anime tends to be measured.
In part, that's simply because no other anime has been made on such an amazingly grand scale. Akira can be difficult to follow, especially on a first viewing, because the soaring visuals are so distracting and the plot is so dense. Otomo's original version was written on an even grander scale, and in condensing it to two hours of screen time, he's created something that generally has to be seen several times to be fully understood. (Although watching both translations can help immensely.)
But his cinematic techniques are simply beyond magnificent, particularly his brilliant use of sound (and his even more brilliant use of complete silence, which gives some of the nightmare sequences a wholly unique sense of creepy unreality). The soundtrack, too, which he commissioned from the 200-plus-member Japanese choral/chant group Geinoh Yamashirogumi, sweeps across an amazing range of styles, from Bulgarian women's choral music to African chanting.
Admittedly, Akira should be seen on the large screen to be fully appreciated. It's simply too big, too detailed and too beautiful a movie to be fully comfortable on a TV screen. But first and foremost, it should be seen, period. It's not just a piece of anime history -- it's also about as good as the genre gets.
