Akira

The basics

Akira is a Japanese Anime which came out in 1988. The manga was written by Katsuhiro Ohtomo and he also went on to write the screen play with Izô Hashimoto and direct it as well.  This film is, well……… about a lot of things really, too many to write down.  

What is this film about?

In 1988 an unexplained explosion happens and vaporizes Tokyo and world war 3 kicks off and then we jump forward 31 years to 2019. Now in Neo-Tokyo we meet Kaneda and Tetsuo, two teenagers in a motorcycle gang (Kaneda is the leader) off for a night of fighting a rival gang called the clowns. In this Tetsuo gets badly hurt crashing his bike so as not to hit a small blue child that looks old and when the army stops them they take Tetsuo with them for the top secret Akira project and that’s just the start of the film.

My views on it

Before the time where Animes were about children that could summon creatures for battle’s or just for fun (Pokémon, Digimon,  Yo-gi-oh, Beyblade, Cardcaptor Sakura etc.).  Or teenagers feeling uncomfortable near each other and it being almost pornography (Ecchi anima like Love Hina and B Gata H Kei AKA B-Cup Slut), and before Studio Ghibli could really make a name for themselves there was Akira.

Back in 1982 the original manga for Akira was only meant to be 200 pages long but due to popular demand in the end Akira went to more than 2000 pages and was a 6 issue epic manga. It wasn’t too long before this came out on the big screen and became a ground-breaking Anime and a cult classic.  Now I could go and talk about interesting facts about this film, or how awesome it is, or go in depth in to the story or any of the themes that this film has or what effect it had on anime itself or a number of things which makes this film a classic and not just in Anime but in cinema. I could do any of these things but that’s already been done so many times so I going to tell you some of the things I didn’t like about Akira.

Due to the fact that Akira was such a big manga it was impossible fit all the details from the manga in to the film. Now you can say this with any film that has come from a book but some do it better than others. In Akira because they had to try and fit in all the story line in to a two hour film, I feel that the characterization was let down a lot. Most of the characters had no back story to them and they seemed very two-dimensional, the only characters we mainly got to know were Kaneda and Tetsuo and that wasn’t really much. Also the relationships between characters was thin, yet again the only one we go to know a bit was Kaneda and Tetsuo’s relationship. Due to this I didn’t care for a lot of the characters, for example because the film only scratched the surface of Tetsuo and Kaori’s (his girlfriend) relationship, when she died I couldn’t of cared less.

Another thing I didn’t like was when Kaneda and Tetsuo where having one of their fights later on in the film I always was thinking ‘Tetsuo can stop tanks, take out an army and pretty much total Neo-Tokyo but a teenager with a laser gun can give him a hard time, mmmmmm that’s not right’.  I know that Kaneda is a tough character and that it is probably their friendship that holds Tetsuo back but still in the context of Tetsuo’s power, state of mind and the fact he is losing control of himself you would think that Kaneda would not be a threat on any level to Tetsuo.

Also if someone was to ask me ‘would you recommend this film?’ I would say ‘no’. Hear me out for this now, beside what I have said I do really like this film and it is a classic but the people who would love this film have already seen it and the people who wouldn’t, haven’t.  This isn’t the kinda film that people randomly pick up at blockbuster. The people who would watch it are film buffs and anime freaks and they have seen it all ready and this is why it called a cult classic.

Favourite Quote

Kaneda: He's not your friend, he's ours! If somebody's gonna kill him, it should be us!

Rating 4/5