Original Manga by/Character Designs by/Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo
Screenplay by Katsuhiro Otomo and Izo Hashimoto
Art Direction by Toshiharu Mizutani
Director of Photography Katsuji Misawa
Edited by Takeshi Seyama
Music by Geinoh Yamashirogumi
AKIRA HAS A CREW OF HUNDREDS OF HARDWORKING PEOPLE WHO I DON'T HAVE TIME TO LIST IN THIS REVIEW. I SINCERELY APOLOGIZE. A MOVIE LIKE AKIRA TAKES AN ARMY OF DEDICATED ARTISTS AND CRAFTSPEOPLE. IT'S SOMETHING TO KEEP IN MIND.
Voice Cast
Nozomu Sasaki as Tetsuo
Mitsuo Iwata as Kaneda
Masaaki Okura as Yamagata
Takeshi Kusao as Kai
Yuriko Fuchizaki as Kaori
Mami Koyama as Kei
Tessho Genda as Ryu
Hiroshi Otake as Nezu
Taro Ishida as Colonel Shikishima
Mizuho Suzuki as Dr. Onishi
Sachie Ito as Kiyoko (no. 25)
Tatsuhko Nakamura as Takashi (no. 26)
Kazuhiro Kando as Masaru (no. 27)
Yosuke Akimoto as Bartender
Koichi Kitamura as Lady Miyako (Doomsday Cult Leader)
. . .
"KANEDAAAAA!!!"
"TETSUOOOOO!!!"
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Post World War III.
In another 2019.
In another Tokyo.
A corrupt government suppresses civil rights. Slimy politicians promise the New Olympic Stadium will 'Make Japan Great Again.' Slimy politicians pocket huge sums of money, dole out enough spare change to their donors and sponsors to stay in power until they croak on the job.
The people take to the streets to make their voices known through acts of civil disobedience, even as they are brutalized by military police. Some take up guns and bombs and wage guerilla warfare against the state. Many try to pretend everything is a-okay by continuing to show up for jobs and school and go on dates at restaurants. Still others seek oblivion in drugs and sex and apocalyptic religions. Young people form motorcycle gangs, and raise all kinds of hell in the streets through indiscriminate acts of violence, vandalism, and defiance of polite societal norms.
A name from the past echoes through all things: Akira . . .
In the futuristic megacity of Neo-Tokyo, a dystopian gerontocracy (arbitrary
rule by old fucks) deposits public funds into the bank accounts of special interests, the military, the cops, and corporations while cutting education, welfare, and civil rights programs. One project that the gerontocrats are looking to ax is known by the codename Akira. This is a top secret superscience operation focused on cultivating psychic powers-though I wonder if it actually isn't obscured by state secret classification so much as it is occluded by the traumas/social breakdowns of World War III, mass global slaughter, nationalist mythcraft, and capitalist greed. Who wants to remember a past so filled with horrors? You turn on the daily news and you know the fix is in, right? You don't have to be a psychic or a historian to know that past is prologue, that shit was permafucked before most people alive today were even born. Even so, Neo-Tokyo is alive with neon-holographic advertising fantasias, premium speed to keep you up for days at a stretch, and all the fucking, fighting, and property destruction you can handle. Akira-the movie,the state of mind, that most fearsome of fantasy vacation hotspots-has something for everybody.
You've got the motorcycle punks led by teenage hooligan Kaneda, who rides a bright red future bike with matching self-made uniform. You've seen it. Kaneda and his turbo-whip are the iconic marketing, the poster. Even if you've never seen the actual film you've come across the imagery of the crimson clad rebel-without-a-future somewhere in your life. Amusingly, Kaneda turns out to be more of a comedy character than the badass he imagines himself to be, but he doesn't lack for spunk.
Kaneda's best friend is Tetsuo, a troubled kid, full of rage at being bullied from kindergarten onwards. Tetsuo is starting to resent Kaneda's big brother routine, and covets that big red bike. Tetsuo is dating a shy girl named Kaori. Kaori could probably do better than Tetsuo, but she's naive and lacks confidence. Tetsuo is no catch as a romantic interest, but he does become the secret protagonist once he awakens to his psychic powers. Although whether he is his own agent or the expression of some wilder, untameable force remains a mystery to this day.
Also in the gang are tall guy Yamagata and short guy Kai. They kick ass. Don't underestimate the short dude. He'll fuck up all of your shit.
Kaneda and his gang are in a neverending street war against the Clowns, biker scum who dress like clowns. They're led by a burly dude named Clown. They have a theme going, but it's kinda mysterious.
Kaneda's crew has a motorduel with the Clowns. From out of nowhere, a small strange child uses telekinesis to blow up Tetsuo's bike. Military police show up to arrest the punks, and haul Tetsuo off to the hospital. This accidental collision between the street and the state sets off an apocalyptic chain of events that will transform Neo-Tokyo into a psionic disaster zone.
Not the first time, y'know . . .
The small, strange psionic kid is Takashi, and he has the number 26 tattooed on the palm of his hand. A guerilla fighter busted him out of a government facility, perhaps to exploit telekinesis as a revolutionary weapon. The guerilla and the psychic brat confront a military police unit, and a building gets destroyed by the brat's uncontrolled brainwaves. Takashi has great power, but he's not a hardened fighter. When he panics at the sight of someone being gunned down by the cops, he looses indiscriminate invisible force. This is a major idea in Akira: social dysfunction and injustice resulting in chaotic destruction.
Takashi is part of a trio of kids who have been subjected to secret experiments to cultivate their psionic powers. This secret program is managed by white lab coat rocking Dr. Onishi and has the backing of the embittered Colonel Shikishima, who sees psychic kids as a safeguard against future calamity. The other two psychic kids are a girl named Kiyoko and a boy named Masaru. The psychic trio also seem to view Shikishima as a father figure, since he's trying to protect them from being shit-canned by a government that no longer sees the utility of the Akira program, and also wishes to avoid the fallout of being associated with human experimentation. Kiyoko, who has oracular powers, has had a vision of doom befalling Neo-Tokyo. The Doctor gathers data. The Colonel attempts to convince the corrupt politicians and their business backers to take the prophecies seriously.
One of the Colonel's political enemies is a representative named Nezu, who is secretly channeling funds and intel to a terrorist guerilla group led by a man named Ryu. Ryu's faction are responsible for busting Takashi loose. One of Ryu's most loyal followers is a teenage girl named Kei, who has a kind of naive crush on Ryu. Not that Kei isn't committed to the cause, but Akira also has a theme of young women having shit options when it comes to dating. Ryu isn't into underage girls, thankfully, but he is into dying for a cause-and also having other people die if necessary. Like Kei, for instance.
Kei crosses paths with Kaneda in jail, and Kaneda hounds her for a date. Kei's so over high school guys, but Kaneda tries to win her over by bullshitting his way into Ryu's faction. Revolutionaries and street punks ought to have more common cause.
All of these actors are, ultimately, locked into narrow visions of vengeance, order, money, ideological purity, scientific obsession, or accumulation of power. Neo-Tokyo cannot go on as normal, because there is no normal. Capitalism and militarism have effectively thwarted social justice. Now comes the rage.
And what a rage it is: motorcycle showdowns that would make the Hell's Angels shit their adult diapers; psychic battles that put X-Men to shame; fashionably dystopian cityscapes that make Blade Runner look like the coffee shop from Friends; and orgasmic vistas of mass destruction that make Godzilla look like Barney the Dinosaur. Akira offers up a festival of annihilation for those tired of the bullshit, and a nightmare of desolation for those clinging to a fantasy of a return to a normal that never existed.
Many images and sequences stand alone in their ferocious power and lurid colors:
A massive memory play assembled from the wreckage of a rubbled city and childhood trauma-I wonder what Katsuhiro Otomo would do if he ever adapted Arthur Miller's After the Fall or Death of A Salesman.
Tetsuo defiantly turning away from us to walk into hellfire-now you know where Sephiroth copped his whole routine!
A trio of psychic children battling an intruder within their private playpen, walls adorned with optimistic future cities straight outta Astro Boy and the Jetsons. These flimsy imaginings crumble like everything else.
A psychic punk squaring off against a fucking tank. Don't bet on the tank.
Slow motion motorcycle wipeouts that make me wonder what Otomo would do with J.G. Ballard's Crash.
The shock and horror on a young guerilla's face the first time she kills a soldier.
Out of control full body metamorphosis escalating to cosmogenesis.
A disillusioned military man marching into certain death for reasons he no longer understands with nothing but his sidearm and samurai spirit to guide him.
A motorcycle gang war crashing a yuppie couple's dinner date.
A vast amoebic cloud of tear gas enveloping a street protest.
The look on someone's face as they channel another's consciousness.
Acid trails of tail lights whipping all over on the air before us, a terrible power we can only grasp in the wake of the ruins it leaves behind itself . . .
All of this set to driving doomsday chanting and percusive instruments. The soundtrack goes with all this quite well, but also stands alone as its own experience. Give it a listen.
The only downside? All the video game versions suck. Not a single one worth one half of one dog turd. Maybe someone has run their own homebrew tabletop Akira role-playing game somewhere out there in TV land? That could be something.
