Futurefilm Retrospective - AKIRA

Here's a no-brainer for this retrospective: a rewatching of Katsuhiro Otomo's masterpiece AKIRA. For this one, I'm going to talk a bit about the seminal anime that any decent anime fan must know, and the epic manga it is based upon.

AKIRA is the story of Kaneda, an adolescent biker who leads a gang of 'like minded individuals', and Tetsuo, his close friend and fellow biker gang member. The year is 2019 (2031 in the manga,) decades after a cataclysmic explosion destroys much of old Tokyo. Neo Tokyo, built over the corpse of the old, is a futuristic city that borrows lots of elements from classic cyberpunk: a degenerating society run by an inept bureaucracy, run down and populated by dissatisfied residents, disillusioned youth, and various other malcontents.

Tetsuo then gets into an accident and gets involved with a secret government program that aims to control latent psychic powers that are present in all people. Tetsuo's powers begin to manifest themselves in an accelerated manner; meanwhile Kaneda, aided by a resistance fighter named Kei pries into the secrets behind the government program and the mysterious Akira.

The anime film is based on the first half of the manga, which at more than 2000 pages is an epic read in itself. While they have similar themes and characters, the two works diverge wildly in terms of plot: the manga deals with foreign intervention, has more characters and little subplots, and ends in a slightly different way. The anime removes a lot of the supporting cast and recasts some in other roles.

For the 1980's the animation is unusually well animated. Even now some of the scenes in this film blow me away. The music is excellent, mostly with themes of traditional Japanese music.

The manga is an evolution on previous stories on psychics made by Otomo, most notably Domu, where a old man in an apartment complex and a young girl engage in psychic combat. Akira ups the scale of the destruction to eleven, with cities destroyed in the blink of an eye.

Both the film and the manga tackle the complex issues of self and the evolution of man. In a way it's a treatise on man vs. technology. When man is given the means to improve himself in ways that he cannot handle, he will not grow, he will only become something like an amoeba: something that exists to grow and consume. This is made more evident in the film where a cult leader espouses the dangers of civilization on the universe itself.


So does the the film and manga have a point? Only the future will tell.