I’ve said before that while I do watch anime, I’m not really
the most up-to-date super-fan some people are. Don’t ask me about the My Hero
Titan Punching Bleach or whatever the kids these days binge on streaming.
That’s not to say I don’t occasionally check contemporary stuff out (I greatly
enjoyed Shinichiro Watanabe’s Space Dandy for one), but often, I prefer to
stick to the more one-off projects of film and original video animation. I’m
talking both the classics like Miyazaki and the rest of Studio Ghibli’s
heart-melting catalogue, to less well-known but nicely dramatic pieces like
Jin-Roh. And, thirty years ago, we had the granddaddy of them all that made it
clear to the west that Japanese animation had decidedly different things to
offer than Disney, Bakshi, or Bluth. I’m talking the seminal triumph of cels
and ink, turning thirty this year—Akira.
To put things in context, you have to look to how Japan was
doing back in 1988—namely, awash with piles of moolah after the coke-snorting
economic book of the last decade. This was when someone like Katsuhiro Otomo,
fresh from creating the original phonebook-sized manga, could call up animation
studio executives and ask them for wads of yen to create a teenager turning
into a giant mass of carbonara. At the time, the threat of nuclear annihilation
still hung over most of civilization—hence the coke I guess—and that’s why a
lot of anime, dominated by grim scifi and cyberpunk, still had the dark,
nihilistic feel to it, with Tokyo being turned into a parking lot every other week
in that medium.
And that’s how Akira begins—in 1989, Godzilla is denied his
monthly demolition duties as Japan’s capital is devastated by a mysterious
explosion. In the far future of 2019, Neo-Tokyo has taken its place as an urban
landscape of neon and mile-high steel—and is it just gorgeous. The opening of
the film is rightfully iconic, with every frame a picture to hang on your wall,
from the city shots to the often-homaged shot of main character Kaneda skidding
his gorgeous crimson future-motorcycle to a halt. Just for sheer spectacle, very
little has come close to this film in thirty years. Even the details are
lavishly produced—in most anime, then and now, most characters just flap their
mouths up and down to save money on motion. Here, they have actual lip movement,
and that created some challenges later we’ll get to.
On the off chance you don’t know the rest of the story,
suffice it to say that Kaneda’s biker gang friend Tetsuo has a run-in with a
strange child that somehow unlocks latent psychic powers that run rampant and
send him on a power-tripping spree of destruction. As you do. There’s several
different story threads running, and this is probably the main flaw of the
film—as it severely compressed the manga strips it was adapting, it lead to
some being more redundant than others. There’s a couple of brief scenes about a
corrupt politician, a student rebellion of some sort that’s not really
elaborated on…it does add to the bleak mood of the film, something that’s done
very well, but you get the sense that Otomo wanted to cram in more than he
really could’ve writing-wise.
But that’s not really going to be your main thought when it
all comes to a head in the last third, and the film just goes nuts. Tanks are
disassembled, laser bazookas light up, highways collapse, and another scene to
be homaged a million times plays out as a laser satellite fires a beam that
causes gravity to invert a few satisfying seconds before it hits. Finally, it transits into delicious David Croenenberg-esque insanity as Tetsuo mutates into a blob of flesh and technology—complete with name-shouting that’s been a
meme for decades, if young 'uns can conceive as such. And no, I won't indulge that...oh, what the hell.
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| "Eat your heart out, SHATNERRRRRRR!" |
Lots of following scifi anime into the 90s would end up with
some unholy amalgamation of meat and metal running riot—but then
we get to what mattered to many a young US viewer around the turn of the
decade, and that’s the western release. The original English dub is…infamous, with
the translators having to work with actual lip movement for a change, but that
doesn’t really matter. No, what does matter is the minds that were blown by the
fact that cartoons could be this incredible looking. Hanna-Barbera just couldn’t
come close, nor could even most ‘adult’ American animation that
languished in VHS dungeons.
This was what got the market for anime imports going in
full, and in turn lead to the medium’s spike in popularity through the
nineties, and eventually, to the tidal wave of options on Netflix and beyond
kids enjoy now. There were certainly others on the way that helped, like Cowboy
Bebop or the nascent monstrosity that was the Pokemon series, but this is what
primed people for the notion that there was more to Japanese animation than just Voltron and
other kid’s shows dubbed apparently by bored janitorial interns.
And that’s why Akira, though it may be flawed beyond the
incredible animation, is still significant thirty years later. Otomo’s next
major feature came much later, in 2004, in the form of Steamboy. Like Akira, it
was lavishly animated, creating a gorgeous steampunk world in an alternate
Victorian London…but lacking a solid manga foundation, the writing problems were
even more amplified here. Characters rant about god knows what and shout at
each other and lots of things aren’t really explained…but despite that, Otomo’s
sense of scale and spectacle still shone through. Having Patrick Stewart for
the dub also helped. It was Japan’s most expensive animated movie then, and
like Akira, floundered initially at the box office. Unlike Akira, it’s been
forgotten for the most part—I suppose anime could only get its big introductory
shot to many a geek only once.
Of course there’s been talk of a US live-action remake of
Akira for many years that’s stalled and shuffled and lied dormant and maybe
looked up from a drunken stupor and so on. Personally, it might be better off
as a series or something—if you’re going to do something again, do it
different, and it could be a good way to perhaps use more of the manga’s many,
many plot threads. But otherwise, I could see it being a redundant cash-in that
loses the beauty of the original painted animation—unless they went the proper effort to translate the imagery of meat and machinery into life. I don’t consider it sacrilege for American
studios to try this sort of thing—Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow proved it can
be done—but usually you get something as confused as that Ghost in the Shell
remake with Scarlett Johansson.
Still, Akira holds up just fine today—I strongly recommend
seeing it on a big screen if you can, just to really appreciate just the
eye-popping nature of it all. You’ll see the influence it’s had on everything
from Stranger Things to the Matrix to Inception to the film version of Ready
Player One. And hey, we’ve only a few months before Tokyo becomes laden with
holographic neon and warring biker gangs with such sweet, sweet looking bikes.
Either way, just for the sheer significance, go out and catch it…
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