Site Index | Blog What's New? Review List Stuff Review Outline Why Hate Anime? Wheat RoD: The TV Haibane Renmei Teen Titans Chaff Akira Legend of the Overfiend Black Heaven Back in the days before Netflix, anime viewers didn't have much option when it came to renting within their fetish. Sometimes Blockbuster or Hollywood Video sets aside a special section for anime (usually under the guise of "foriegn films" or "special interest"), but that's a dicey chance at best. However, much like Ninja Scroll, Akira is almost a surefire certainty on the shelves of any video store. I obviously haven't done any formal polling, but I've noticed a sort of oddball relationship between anime fans and Akira: the diehard anime fans, the ones who live off of animesuki.com and constantly "Hey you hooligans! Get off my lawn!" badger me to review their new flavor-of-the-month series, tend to really dislike Akira. On the other hand, the people I know who barely watch anime at all, but have seen Akira nonetheless, love it to death. So in some small way inside my small head, I figured perhaps Akira could show me exactly where it is I lay on the spectrum of anime fandom, once and for all. The thing to keep in mind about Akira while you're reading this review is that this is one of the "classics". This is regarded by many to be required anime viewing. This is an anime that many people watched, and based only on its contents decided to further explore anime as a genre. So while Akira may not be the king, to many it is something of a herald. Characters: KANEDA!! TETSUO!! KANEDA!! TETSUO!! Oh, man. That cracks me up. But not in a good way. When it comes right up to the wall, the only two characters who are essential to Akira's plot each get mentioned twice in this section's opening paragraph. Kaneda is a cliche bad boy teenager who leads a faux-rebellious biker gang, and Tetsuo is his loyal minion. Their relationship isn't adequately explored before it becomes important, but apparently Kaneda treats Tetsuo like a little brother, and Tetsuo resents that. Of course, Akira tends to brush aside subtle plot points in favor of flashy animation (which I'll touch on in a later section) so it isn't particularly easy to glean this information from the movie's opening scenes, in which the two boys beat people up and show off their coolness by saying "damn" a lot. The best character in the movie, despite not having any lines. Kaneda acquires a girlfriend partway through the story; a character so irrelevant it's impossible to determine why she's around at all. In fact, I didn't even bother to remember her name, and since recalling it would require another partial viewing of Akira I will just call her "Jane" and spare myself the grief. "Jane" is a member of an underground organization that is reeling against... something. The corrupt government, the military, Martha Stewart... heck, it's possible her little group of miscreants just likes to call themselves a rebellion to justify their hard-on for blowing things up. As we'll see when I get to the story, "Jane" is a completely useless character and we can ignore her. We come, then, to the three zombie-alien children. They aren't really zombies or aliens, disappointingly enough; they're hyper-evolved human beings who have developed incredible psychic powers. Kind of like the X-Men, only bedridden. These three characters are used interchangably in the story... we have "the fat one", "the skinny one", and "the girl we're supposed to feel sorry for because she's in bed all the time". Let me explain something here, Akira: if I could move, manipulate and ignite things with my mind, I'd never get out of bed either. I don't pity anyone who can break my spine by blinking. So wait... what about the title character? Akira himself? Well, he's *a bunch of body parts locked away in jars, kind of like a bad junior high science project*. I mean... sweet mercy. This is the guy everyone's so deathly afraid of? This is the god-child that almost destroyed the world? C'mon. There's dumb, and then there's dumb. Story: Akira is set in your typical post-apocalyptic blahblah dirty grimy yadda yadda urban hellhole humpty dumpty super-slumland, the same setting any and all movies set after 2050 uses. We're quickly introduced to Kaneda and his rowdies, a gang of bikers who like to race and beat up other gangs of bikers who like to race. Another explosion. Ho hum. This night, however, after showing up at a bar and not drinking anything, the fight that Kaneda and his boys pick with one of their rival gangs goes horribly wrong. A weird zombie child shows up at the scene (for those keeping notes, this would be "the skinny one") and all the boys are taken in for questioning by the local militant gestapo (all futuristic societies are under round-the-clock martial law, after all) except for Tetsuo, who is whisked off to some indestinct government facility for "testing". At this point in the story, everything about the bikes, the rebels, the "bad boy" persona shown to us in the opening scenes, and essentially everything else prior to this point in the story becomes unimportant. The experiments Testuo undergoes while in Big Brother's care somehow causes his brain to evolve to a new state of being, giving him godlike psychic powers, greater even than those of the previous three experiments (these would be the zombie children) and making his hair completely ridiculous. Tetsuo learns, however, that his powers are not as great as the legendary Akira's. So, naturally, he decides to blow up the world. (Some murky reference to Tetsuo always having resented Kaneda sticking up for him is made at this point, but like I said, it's not really relevant.) And boy howdy, when Tetsuo blows up the world, he does it up right. Arm gets chopped off? No problem; build a new one out of recyclables. Before long Tetsuo has *mutated into an enormous amorphous blob of horrible human flesh* and loses all control of his powers. So Kaneda screams his name over and over until *the zombie childen step in and take Tetsuo off to another dimension*. So sure, I left a few things out. But why bother with the details? Akira sure doesn't. The information we need to process the story is present only in the barest sense of the word; we're told what the movie feels we need to know, and then we're told to shut up and watch the cool bike race or the sewer getaway scene or the humungous explosions or whatever. Watching Akira feels kind of like being given a set of Lego blocks and a picture of the end product but not any instructions. Well, except that Akira sucks and Legos are awesome. Man, I totally wish I had some Legos right now, instead of writing this The kind of smile only a psychotic godling bent on destroying the world could have. review of Akira. Animation: The animation is simultaneously the best and worst thing of Akira. Now, it looks great. Most anime movies do (it's the anime series that you have to be wary of most of the time). Though it lacks imagination (this setting's been done before, and done before, and done before, after all) the art is nice to look at and the animation is crisp and crunchy. If I were being fair and balanced, the animation of Akira is deserving of more than three hamhams. The problem with the animation is that Akira gave me the impression that the guys who made this film decided that all it had to do was look pretty. There's something to be said for a movie that looks darn cool, of course, but there's something to be said for relating to a story's characters and having a solid, cohesive plot as well. The entire subtext of this movie seems to be "look at me please, but don't think about me". And that just rubs me completely the wrong way. Another reason I marked off Akira's animation score: I don't necessarily want to see people exploding into *massive mountains of ugly flesh*. Like Fooly Cooly or Legend of the Overfiend, Akira often puts stuff onscreen just to kick up the yuck factor. The movie should have shown me more tricked-out bikes and less piles of goopy slop. Culture Shock: This is the highest category score I've ever given to a piece of chaff. I knocked off half-a-ham for Akira's muddy translation and superJapanish character names. No big deal. The reason for the 5.5 hams I didn't knock off is far more interesting. As an enthusiastic moviegoer, I see a lot of movies every year that have "the best special effects since that last movie that had the best special effects". Every year the CG gets more detailed, the camera tricks get more sophisticated, and post-production gets more and more expensive. The result: more and more movies that look visually stunning. A young zombie Louie Anderson. But just like a steroid addict has bulding muscles on the surface but not much of anything under the hood, the majority of these movies tend to have lackluster scripts, unimaginative plots, flat characters, and so on. I don't think I have to get into a tirade here about Star Wars: Three More Movies, or The Matrix Rehashed to prove my point. Akira is exactly like that. The movie looks so cool that it hopes you won't notice there's nothing under the hood. This of course is not a good thing, but it's also not something that's foreign to American moviegoers. Were Akira a live-action film you can bet it'd be a humdrum summer blockbuster rather than a heavy-handed source of Oscar buzz. So Akira is a legend. That's fine with me, I suppose. I watched it, so now my obligation is done. So where does this put me on the spectrum of anime fandom? The outlook isn't so good. In the end I just wasn't impressed enough with Akira's coolness to overlook its lame cast and sickly story. But rather than just admit I'm a bigger anime whore than I originally thought, I'll just amend my original statement and then scamper away. Maybe the reason the anime fanatics I know dislike Akira, but the casual viewers I know love it, is that those of us who have seen a lot of anime have a better cross-section of what a "good" anime really is. Sure Akira looks awesome, but those of us who watch anime regularly know that there's a lot of stuff out there that looks awesome and has an awesome plot. Stuff that impacts our emotions, or hurts our brain, or makes us laugh or cry or vomit - anything, really, other than nothing. Vapid disinterest is essentially the only thing triggered by the actions and dialogue in Akira, no matter how many explosions or neat-o motorcycles it has. Links Anime Studio - Akira Animenation Listing IMDB Listing The irony of it is, Akira could have been a much better movie. Take away the zombie children, and he super-psycho powers, and the... well, all that stuff really. That leaves us with a story in Neo-Tokyo about a bunch of disattached youths, their awesome bikes, and an underground rebel group desperately in need of some focus. Isn't that enough for a decent plot? Frosting is good only if there's some cake underneath. In the end, I still really wish I had some Legos. Overall Rating:

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