Apr 01 2009
B+ Movie Review: Akira
Monday, I talked about Japanese Animation and gave a very easily accessible and understandable example of the medium. Today, I’d like to talk about another classic of Anime that’s just a bit less accessable.
I speak of fanboy favorite Akira.
Akira is the sort of anime that makes it hard for westerners to accept cartoons as serious stories. It’s a very pretty film, but the story has a steep learning curve that gets even steeper if you have no clue about Japanese culture. The fact that it’s one of the three or four movies that’s on everyone’s Anime 101 list attests to its importantce, but it’s as likely to leave you scratching your head as pumping your fist.
The story of Akira starts with three very different groups. The first is a bunch of pill popping juvenille delinquent bikers, the second is the military government and the third is a group of revolutionaries and/or terrorists. The three come together when a biker (named Tetsuo) crashes into an albino toddler (formerly in the care of the government) that had been sprung from incarceration by the revolutionaries. Everyone involved survives, but Tetsuo gets dragged off by the government along with the escapee. Another biker, the alpha delinquent Kenada, joins up with the revolutionaries, his motivations more that he wants to sleep with one of them than he’s trying to find his friend and gangmate.
Somewhere in here is where the psychic powers come in.
You see, the albino toddler is part of a small group of powerful psychics. Coming into contact with him awakens Tetsuo’s hidden potential. Tetsuo also has a major case of self esteem issues which once combined with ridiculous amounts of ability to do cool and vicious things rapidly turns into a bloody mess.
In the meantime, the government is collapsing, cults are on the rise and giant teddy bears are showing up for no good reason. And all of this has something to do with Akira, who may be a god or may be a bomb or may be just a guy but is definately responsible for blowing up Tokyo at some point in the past.
Confused? Right there with you.
What makes this movie worth watching, first and foremost, is the the amazing visuals used to tell the story. The streets of Neo-Tokyo are very real, even if they contain guys with laser rifles and punks on electric bikes. The characters are beliveable, with understandable motivations and reasonable reactions to situations both fantastic and mundane.
If you can get past the premise, Akira is worth watching once or twice. I won’t debate on dubbed versus subtitles, though the remastered version from 2001 may be worth a look. Also, this might not be a bad one to experience before they do a live action version, a project that has been in the works for some time and currently scheduled for 2011.
Akira gets a B from me, mostly for being almost incomprehensibly weird even if it is held together by unimanigable coolness. Check it out for the experience, but if at the end you’re sitting on the couch wondering what exactly it was you just saw, don’t feel bad. Most of us, even those who liked it, felt just the same way.
