Away From The Hype: AKIRA

Akira ushered in the Japanese animation trend to the west that still abides all around the world. There were anime and Manga enthusiasts before but Akira was the movie that turned it from a niche interest for hobbyists into a full blown phenomenon. 

Comic books have often had this life cycle where they flourish then become nerdy then they flourish again. Twenty years ago, society’s views of a person reading a Guardians of the Galaxy comic would have been quite negative. Now, cool kids are flocking to the cinema to see the adventures of Peter Quill and getting hooked on the funny books as a result. 

Akira helped do the same for anime and Manga. The Sci-Fi channel in England used to reserve a block of programming on Fridays for anime and as Japaniana became cooler and cooler, it brought manga and anime with it. To a certain degree. There are still some weirdos who are strange about it and turn their enjoyment of Japanese culture into something odd and perverse. Most of my worst Twitter encounters have been with people who have anime characters as their profile picture but that is what it is. 

Akira has been hugely influential for not just the sci-fi genre but for filmmakers in general. It revolutionized animation, created tropes like the sliding bike stop that still appears in movies 34 years later such as Nope, and the trope of the mutation gone wrong that’s appeared in Rick and Morty, Adventure Time, and others. 

Stranger Things owes a lot of its Eleven plot to Akira, as does Midnight Special, Chronicle, and Looper. It has become a movie like Citizen Kane in that even if you’ve never seen it, you’ve actually seen a lot of it. Citizen Kane after all can be nearly completely remade with just references to it in The Simpsons. 

I first saw Akira in university in the early 2000s. I enjoyed it but also watched it in an… educational haze so my memories are bitty of the narrative. Recently, I have found myself reading more Manga and always, when I look for the next thing to read, Akira inevitably pops up. It’s a 2000 page beast with 6 volumes and 120 chapters, which is like a lot of Manga where reading the first volume is like taking the first steps on a long, long journey.  

Seeing these recommendations, references, and reading more news about a possible live-action adaptation had me wondering if, 34 years after its release, Akira is worth the hoo-ha around it. So it’s time to watch the movie and see how it is away from the hype. 

Akira

Gorgeous. 34 years has not dulled this movie’s beauty in any way. Every frame is beautiful. The backgrounds are rendered with such detail you feel as though they’re photographs and the smoothness and clarity of the animation betrays the hours of work that has gone into the creation of the movie. 

The opening scenes of the movie that show off Neo-Tokyo at night are instantly captivating with a cacophony of neon lights, movement, and life. The bike chase that kicks off the story manages to feel both real and impossible with heightened action but animation that has weight so even though we’re seeing people jump from bikes only to be headbutted into oblivion, it doesn’t feel cartoonish or distractingly artificial. 

Not that there’s anything wrong with a cartoon feeling like a cartoon and the movie never loses its sense of fun. Kaneda, our (sort of) hero, is a goofy lead trying to be cool with his souped up bike and misplaced confidence, especially with Kei, the rebel who he meets by chance and fails to charm. 

I’ve always found that Asian filmmakers have a skill not often found with Western creators of being able to mix disparate genres in a seamless way that never feels too much one way or the other. For example, Parasite’s mix of heist tropes, comedy, horror, and intense violence never feels like we’re watching four different movies. In Akira we have sci-fi and body horror next to goofy slapstick and the chocolate and peanut butter mix perfectly well.  

The way the movie has influenced modern filmmakers cannot be understated and as I wrote in the intro, there are themes and images from the movie still being used and recycled and reinvented. Watching the movie I saw literal shots that had been taken from Akira whole cloth to be inserted in other movies. An example is a scene where the rebels are trying to sneak into the enemy base through the sewers when they are ambushed by machine gun toting cops. 

A moment where the hail of bullets hit the water and created a line of water spraying up the ceiling is almost exactly matched in The Matrix when Neo is firing his machine gun into the offices where the Agents have Morpheus held prisoner. It even feels like the sound effects are so alike, they might actually just be the same sounds. It makes me wonder if they ever succeed in making a live-action version of the movie it will suffer the same fate as John Carter and Dune (1984) which were looked at as Star Wars knock offs even though it was George Lucas who heavily borrowed from their source materials rather than the other way around. 

Akira’s world-building owes a lot to having to make a 2 hour movie from a 2000 page Manga, so we get hints of other plots that are happening at the same time as Kaneda is trying to stop Tetsuo. Monks worshiping Akira and political machinations are shown and given enough time to make an impact but not delved into too deeply. They help provide color to the world and show us what life in Neo-Tokyo is like outside of the street level biker gangs and military trying to avoid a second Akira-related cataclysm. 

In much the same way that Watergate influenced so much American popular culture, the atom bombs dropped on Japan during the Second World War have almost created a genre within Japanese art in which the bomb or the aftermath of the bomb plays such a huge part. 

Godzilla, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Akira (to name just three) all heavily feature imagery of suburban destruction and huge, incalculable explosions.

The opening shot of Akira is massively iconic with Tokyo enveloped in a circular blast that wipes out the city and throws us into the future where the story begins. It’s a great way to illuminate the stakes before we’ve even started our popcorn as we know straightaway what Akira is capable of and what everyone is trying to prevent.

Conclusion

Hailed as a masterpiece for good reason, Akira has more than stood the test of time and managed to create a filmmaking language that is still in use. Cyberpunk or tech-noir movies always go back to the Akira well for ideas, homages, and imagery. And as mentioned in the intro, the influence of the movie is still seen throughout pop culture and creators for whom it was clearly a pivotal moment in their movie watching lives.

The thing that stuck out to me watching it in 2023 was how efficient it is. So many modern movies will give us a 90-minute movie stretched into two hours that manages to linger on the wrong parts and undercook characters. With Akira, it’s pedal to the floor from the first image and doesn’t let up until the finale. We’re given enough character beats to form relationships to our heroes and villains, and things that are not integral to the plot are coloured in enough to give us a taste of the bigger world outside of the battle between Kaneda and Tetsuo. 

It is a testament to how interesting and fun this movie is that after I finished it, I went on Amazon to order the first book. I’m not a massive Manga reader though I have dabbled (Assassination Classroom all day every day!) but the prospect of a 2000-page book set in this world is too tantalizing to not give it a try.

Away from the hype, Akira fares very, very well. It is the Rosetta stone for so much sci-fi, body horror, and cyberpunk that it’s like reading Shakespeare for the first time.   

Watch Akira