Akira. (15.)
Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. 1988. 124 mins
Re-released to celebrate its 25th anniversary, Akira is a landmark feature, the first to really open up the west to Japanese anime. Seen today with a quarter of a century’s perspective, a viewer may look at this tale of motorcycle gangs battling the military and mutant psychic children in Neo Tokyo, a towering metropolis built after old Tokyo was destroyed in an 1988 Atomic blast and wonder, what the hell was that all about?
It’s not that the story is exactly hard to follow, but it is hard to work out how we are supposed to react to the characters and events we are seeing; you are constantly wondering if something was meant to be ambiguous or if something was lost in the subtitling/ dubbing? The animation was a marvel at the time but looks quite mundane now. The clouds of smoke seem like a solid mass and when there are then scenes with solid gooey masses it is difficult to know what exactly they represent.
The main problem is that it has been too influential. What was bold and new 25 years ago now seems just like every other anime.
Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. 1988. 124 mins
Re-released to celebrate its 25th anniversary, Akira is a landmark feature, the first to really open up the west to Japanese anime. Seen today with a quarter of a century’s perspective, a viewer may look at this tale of motorcycle gangs battling the military and mutant psychic children in Neo Tokyo, a towering metropolis built after old Tokyo was destroyed in an 1988 Atomic blast and wonder, what the hell was that all about?
It’s not that the story is exactly hard to follow, but it is hard to work out how we are supposed to react to the characters and events we are seeing; you are constantly wondering if something was meant to be ambiguous or if something was lost in the subtitling/ dubbing? The animation was a marvel at the time but looks quite mundane now. The clouds of smoke seem like a solid mass and when there are then scenes with solid gooey masses it is difficult to know what exactly they represent.
The main problem is that it has been too influential. What was bold and new 25 years ago now seems just like every other anime.
