The Accidental Otaku (#1 ; 05202010)
Akira (1988 / 2001)
Director - Katsuhiro Otomo
Plot : (taken from the AnimeNewsNetwork Excyclopedia, because I'm no good at summaries) "In the year 2019, thirty-one years have passed since the outbreak of World War III. In Neo-Tokyo, all authority is waging a never-ending struggle against the underground that virtually rules the shattered city. A top-secret child with amazing powers of the minds breaks free from custody and accidentally gets a motorcycle gang involved in the project. The incident triggers psychic powers within one of the members, Tetsuo, and he is taken by the army and experimented on. His mind has been warped and is now on the path of war, exacting revenge on the society that once called him weak."
Opinion : What can be said about Akira that hasn't already been said? It's a seminal work in the giant tapestry of the art that is anime. It's one of those benchmarks you hold up for the rest of the world to judge as a standard, much like Citizen Kane or Star Wars or True Grit. Much as the animation itself is nearly flawless, much as the story convolutes down to the oft-times heavy handedness of Otomo's other works (see Roujin-Z, which Otomo scripted), this movie is not for the uninitiated. When your friends want to get involved in this "anime-thing" you watch all the time, Akira is not what you show them.
On a technical note, there are two distinct versions of this movie (possibly more, but only two major ones). To those otaku who came to anime before 2000, we're more familiar with the Streamline version, released in 1988. The rights were bought by Pioneer and rereleased in 2001. The newer version, while technically better, contains some points that are a little grating. For instance, whenever Tetsuo yells out Kaneda's name, it sounds, at least to me, that he's yelling, "CANADA!"...and it makes me giggle every time. And while I do enjoy and appreciate the newer version for the accuracy, I still like the voices and emotion in the older version.
Not enough can be said about the animation itself, the echoes of which can be seen in a great many works of today. Even watching anime, seeing Akira is a little off-putting. Little is exaggerated for the sake of beauty or cuteness or anything else. You get the ugliness of people as they might be. People are also killed by the scores in this in interesting and gruesome ways. Perhaps it is this realism which stands Akira by itself against most of the rest of the anime genre. Even in the stark weirdness that is serial experiments Lain, there is an anime cuteness to Lain in her bear suit. In Akira, that realistic cute is turned on its' head, even to the extent of being nightmare fuel. The ending brings something primal, past the mass destruction, there is the primal relationship between Tetsuo and Kaneda and, beyond that, possibilities. A future of hope that hadn't been. A happy ending, essentially, but nonetheless an intense movie.
Director - Katsuhiro Otomo
Plot : (taken from the AnimeNewsNetwork Excyclopedia, because I'm no good at summaries) "In the year 2019, thirty-one years have passed since the outbreak of World War III. In Neo-Tokyo, all authority is waging a never-ending struggle against the underground that virtually rules the shattered city. A top-secret child with amazing powers of the minds breaks free from custody and accidentally gets a motorcycle gang involved in the project. The incident triggers psychic powers within one of the members, Tetsuo, and he is taken by the army and experimented on. His mind has been warped and is now on the path of war, exacting revenge on the society that once called him weak."
Opinion : What can be said about Akira that hasn't already been said? It's a seminal work in the giant tapestry of the art that is anime. It's one of those benchmarks you hold up for the rest of the world to judge as a standard, much like Citizen Kane or Star Wars or True Grit. Much as the animation itself is nearly flawless, much as the story convolutes down to the oft-times heavy handedness of Otomo's other works (see Roujin-Z, which Otomo scripted), this movie is not for the uninitiated. When your friends want to get involved in this "anime-thing" you watch all the time, Akira is not what you show them.
On a technical note, there are two distinct versions of this movie (possibly more, but only two major ones). To those otaku who came to anime before 2000, we're more familiar with the Streamline version, released in 1988. The rights were bought by Pioneer and rereleased in 2001. The newer version, while technically better, contains some points that are a little grating. For instance, whenever Tetsuo yells out Kaneda's name, it sounds, at least to me, that he's yelling, "CANADA!"...and it makes me giggle every time. And while I do enjoy and appreciate the newer version for the accuracy, I still like the voices and emotion in the older version.
Not enough can be said about the animation itself, the echoes of which can be seen in a great many works of today. Even watching anime, seeing Akira is a little off-putting. Little is exaggerated for the sake of beauty or cuteness or anything else. You get the ugliness of people as they might be. People are also killed by the scores in this in interesting and gruesome ways. Perhaps it is this realism which stands Akira by itself against most of the rest of the anime genre. Even in the stark weirdness that is serial experiments Lain, there is an anime cuteness to Lain in her bear suit. In Akira, that realistic cute is turned on its' head, even to the extent of being nightmare fuel. The ending brings something primal, past the mass destruction, there is the primal relationship between Tetsuo and Kaneda and, beyond that, possibilities. A future of hope that hadn't been. A happy ending, essentially, but nonetheless an intense movie.