Crossover by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. The Ticketmaster×Animeister.
Today's movie up for review is considered to be one of the best, most influential anime of all time...and I've never seen it.
I know
some things about it from secondary sources (particularly the mild copyright infringement that took place when
SNK created the
King Of Fighters character,
K'9999, right down to having Tetsuo's
Japanese voice actor record lines for the
2001 and
2002 entries in the series, leading to a twenty-plus-year absence of the character for legal reasons, at which point he was redesigned and renamed as
Khronen for
KOF XV), but that's about it.
So imagine my surprise when
My Hero Academia would give the Villain Tomura Shigaraki (real name: Tenko Shimura) a red cape and a body horror arm in Seasons Six and Seven, respectively. It's
Anime August, so I took that as a sign that I should finally watch
Akira.
Directed by
Katsuhiro Ōtomo and based on his 1982 manga of the same title, 1988's
Akira takes place in a world where the
Cold War did devolve and escalate into World War III, culminating in a nuclear detonation in Tokyo, Japan, on July 16, 1988. In the then-distant future of 2019, Neo Tokyo is a barely functioning, post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk society overrun by
Tron-cycle-riding,
Mad Max-inspired biker gangs, a lethally authorized police force, and an occupying military presence who abduct children and young adults to mutate them into deformed psychic soldiers. Aside from the animation being mind-blowingly intricate and smooth for the frame rate available at the time (and sometimes beyond even that), the impressive thing about
Akira is how much it predicted about our recent past. There's the obvious stuff like the pandemic-era lawlessness, the police brutality, and even modern issues like the military being deployed to suppress chaotic behavior and detain undesirables or a powerful leader subverting due process for his own interests. But there's also the little things like the 2019 Olympics being held in Tokyo (ours were postponed to
2020, and were the 32nd Olympiad rather than the 30th, but that's eerily close).
It's also important to note that I watched
Akira with the
Pioneer dub, as I found the
Streamline dub to be too stilted and...accessible, shall we say, which is an odd choice considering how violent, bloody, and sexual the movie's imagery can be.
After being injured when he crashes his bike into an escaped psychic's telekinesis field, and detained and experimented on by the Japanese government, Tetsuo Shima (
Joshua Seth, probably best known as the dub voice of Tai in
Digimon) begins to develop psychic powers of his own and goes on a rampage in search of the source of the voice in his head: the titular Akira. As he does, his powers begin to grow out of control, turning his body into an all-consuming mass of pain, insanity, and horror that looks as amazing as it does revolting.
Meanwhile to the early stages of Tetsuo's awakening, his friend Kaneda (
Johnny Yong Bosch, of
Power Rangers and
Bleach fame, but his voice
résumé is huge) gets easily distracted by a female revolutionary named Kei (
Wendee Lee, whose early roles include Bulma from
OG Dragon Ball, T.K. from
Digimon, and Yoruichi from
Bleach) and finds himself in the middle of a greedy councilman's political scheme that maybe involves Akira, Tetsuo, and a doomsday cult, but is never explained and doesn't matter because he's a rat-toothed, fat, ugly bastard-type character who gets what he presumably deserves when Tetsuo starts randomly crushing everything with his mind and the head of the military turns on the council to protect his psychic child soldier program even though it's clearly gotten so out of hand that Tetsuo is more powerful than the other three test subjects combined.
This seems like an odd place to start talking about the character designs like a sexist anti-woke grifter (especially since I'm not one), but I find it difficult to believe Kaneda's attraction to Kei because, aside from the aforementioned fat bastard and tall military guy (who has a chronic case of Skinny Nappa Disease), and maybe the Dr. Wily-looking scientist,
all of the primary and secondary characters look the same. I know it's an "80s throwing back to the 50s" intentional aesthetic choice to give most characters a round face and a thick but lanky body type, and I get that in a crime-beset country, it's survival common sense to have short hair so the criminals have less to grab. I also know that there are subtle differences in character height and stance, and that they wear different clothes. But there was a scene where Kaneda, Kei, and some extras broke into the Akira compound dressed in maintenance uniforms, and I couldn't tell them apart.
This isn't (mainly) an "I'm mad because fictional cartoon women aren't sexy" problem; it is a point of narrative confusion and disbelief, and therefore a source of disconnection for me regarding any character or plot that doesn't involve Tetsuo, and even
that gave me pause at times. Like, the secret government hospital room he escapes from and the regular hospital room he wakes up in after his powers go off for the first time are the same background, so it isn't clear at first if we're watching a flashback or not. When Kaneda shows up in the compound later to rescue him, there's this whole, "I have power now, so I don't need you to rescue me all the time anymore" exchange that, while acted well to communicate a history, isn't sufficiently backed with enough show for the tell to work like it should. Instead, the first fifteen to twenty minutes of this two hour movie has Kaneda rescue Tetsuo from a biker gang
once (and terribly, considering what happens soon after), then the incident with the psychic kid happens and Tetsuo gets captured and experimented on, and the guy who supposedly "always saves him" gets distracted by
(sorry, I've been watching a lot of
Dr. Jordan Breeding videos lately), leaving Tetsuo to escape by himself...somehow, then pass out and end up back in a hospital so we can actually see him escape this time, all the while, Col. Nappa Face and Dr. Wily have deep, heated, "hopeful theoreticals vs. violent practicality" philosophical discussions about what it means when one young adult can make the entire country explode with his mind.
that happens. And you know what else happens? It turns out that the nuclear detonation from the opening wasn't a nuclear detonation after all; it was Akira! Yeah; in the movie's world, thoughts are the energy that connects everything in the Universe, and some people have more of it than others, so of course, the government thought they could harvest and weaponize it, and a psychic
demon core situation happened. Somehow (despite Akira being a psychic nuke and the movie spending most of its runtime showing how nigh-unstoppable Tetsuo can be), they managed to capture him and reduce him to a preserved organ collection. In the end, the only way to stop Tetsuo from merging with the planet was to have the three other test subjects re-form Akira and fuse the five of them together into a mind-singularity that births a new Universe or something.
Again,
Akira is a visually impressive, eerily prescient film with a stacked dub cast, but as I thought about the numerous side plots that went nowhere, the uneven pacing, and the barely existent character motivations, not to mention the odd, "you wouldn't understand this without information from something else" ending, I felt compelled to at least
investigate the
manga, and yeah; there is
so much more context, story, history, and just straight-up plot differences (like Akira being an actual character and Kaneda and Tetsuo being believable rivals with more than twenty minutes of interaction before things get relatively worse), in the
manga than the "let's just get to Tetsuo going berserk, sense and context be damned" approach that the movie took. And that's just what I gathered from a Wikipedia summary of the
manga, not even reading the
manga itself.
C+
When we all cool down, please remember to
Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read because the future is uncertain and we're all connected, and follow me on
BlueSky,
Tumblr,
Reddit,
Facebook,
Instagram,
Pinterest,
YouTube, and
LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.
Also,
Stay Tuned for tomorrow's
Time Drops and a reminder of what things big and small I have...well, not exactly planned or in store (because I don't have my own store), but, you know what I mean.
Ticketmaster×Animeister,
Crossed Over,
And Out.
Comments
Post a Comment