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Review
AKIRA
Rating: 
Japan. 1987.
Director/Based on the Comic Created by Katsuhiro Otomo, Screenplay – Izo Hashimoto & Katsuhiro Otomo, Producers – Shunzo Kato & Ryohei Suzuki, Photography – Katsuji Misawa, Music – Susumu Miyodangawa & Shoji Yamashiro, Animation Supervisor – Atsuko Fukushima, Art Direction – Toshiharu Mizutani. Production Company – Akira Committee.
Plot: 2019 in Neo-Tokyo. Following a police arrest, the street punk Tetsuo is taken prisoner by the top-secret Akira Project where he is subjected to a series of tests designed to unleash his latent psychokinetic powers. But Akira is really more powerful than anyone has imagined and breaks out, creating a swathe of destruction across the city as he mutates into another lifeform.
Animation (anime) and comic-books (manga) are a major industry in Japan. These can prove a source of endless fascination for Western audience with their often amazingly high levels of sublimated violence and sexuality. Akira, itself the adaption of a telephone-book sized weekly manga, quickly became Japan’s most acclaimed anime film. Upon its international release in 1989, Akira singlehandedly brought attention to anime in the West and transformed it into a cult phenomenon. Within a matter of years there were several English-language magazines devoted exclusively to anime, while anime releases have gained their own separate niches in most videostores. Akira writer/director/creator Katsuhiro Otomo became one of the few recognizable anime name in the West.
Katsuhiro Otomo began as a graphic artist, drawing and writing manga since the 1970s. The Akira manga, which was published between 1982 and 1990 after first appearing in Young magazine, was extraordinarily ambitious in scale – when Marvel brought up the English-language rights they released it in 38 serialized volumes. Otomo had also worked on film, designing characters for animated films like Crusher Joe (1983) and Rintaro’s Harmageddon (1983) and directing segments of the anime anthologies Neo-Toyko (1987) and Robot Carnival (1987). Since Akira, and despite the enormous acclaim he received as a result, Otomo’s output however has been erratic – up until the mid-00s, he only directed one-and-a-half other films – the live-action World Apartment Horror (1991) and an episode of the anime anthology Memories (1995). But the attachment of Otomo’s name to a project even in the vaguest regard – Roujin Z (1991), Perfect Blue (1997), Spriggan (1998), Metropolis (2001) – became enough to carry a film further than it might have otherwise have gone unnoticed. Otomo promised a feature-length return to anime but a number of project, including intriguingly a collaboration with Alejandro Jodorowsky, were announced but never emerged. It took Otomo 17 years to finally do so with the impressive Steampunk anime Steamboy (2004), although he quickly followed this with the live-action Bugmaster (2006) about a wandering exorcist.
On screen, Akira plays like a collision between Cyberpunk and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It is a stunning vision – one that fuses Cyberpunk urban nihilism, religious chiliasm, what seems like a transcendent vision of The Bomb and a wild punk version of The Fury (1978) all into one (if not entirely coherently). Mostly, Akira is constructed in a series of climaxes that get progressively bigger and bigger until they almost reach a point of sensory overload. It is a film of epic, even cosmic, scope – Tetsuo’s path of destruction through the city, wiping out bridges, tanks and vast cryonic vats, silently journeying up into space to tear apart a Star Wars laser satellite, and melding with the Akira entity as a ball of pure white light consuming the entire city in its path, is exhilarating and awe-inspiring. And the final vision travelling through space, following beams of light, which finally coalesce into a giant eye that whispers “I am Tetsuo” before the end credits roll is one that quite blows the mind with its scale of wholly cosmic grandeur.
Neo-Tokyo is a vista of grimy downbeat Cyberpunk imagery filled with bewilderingly beautiful neon cityscapes, holographic ads and thousand-storey buildings. Although this aspect of the film remains disappointing in some respects – the background is rarely of much relevance and the vehicles and particularly the fashions don’t seem to have changed at all in 31 years. The action scenes pelting down tunnels on bikes and hoverjets in a bedlam of lights and sound however are breathlessly exciting. The film also has an amazingly high level of violence, the casual gratuitousness of which proved somewhat amusing to the Western theatrical audience I was sitting amongst as they watched about the dozenth person get their teeth kicked in. A lot of the film plays as wish fulfillment on political anarchy and destructive power fantasies – its subtext is not a particularly profound one. But as an exercise in escalating size and sense of wonder, Akira cannot be equaled. Last updated: Saturday, 06 June 2009
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