Start out with cool biker gang and leader on cool bike. But wait a minute .... who's that other biker gang coming to harass them. Just some random gang for action?! Important to the plot? Why heck no. Not in this movie. In fact, this biker gang that for some reason choose to dress like the Jokers from Batman Beyond come in and mess with our heroes and are never seen from again.
However in all this a strange boy walks out into the street. And he appears old. Real old. Heck maybe it will be explained later. Seems important to the plot to have a kid, who is like fifty walk out onto the middle of the street. And there are cops surrounding the kid. Uh oh, story is picking up. Ain't it.
Tetsowo (whatever) crashes and Kanda and the rest of his gang go to jail or back to school pen for juvenile delinquents while Tetsowo goes to a hospital.
Kanada sees a pretty girl .... that looks like a boy and springs her and his friends out of jail or wherever they were, by causing a riot. Pretty clever our hero. He tries to hit on her but she will have none of it. In fact, it turns out she works for some kind of resistance. A resistance, oh boy where is this going?
So to sum up, we have an old looking kid that the government is interested in. A rebellious biker gang, two in fact and one has a cool looking bike the other dresses up like clowns. and A resistance! 0.0 A resistance a against what? It's so secret not even the audience knows. I think they want to bring down the government. From how this movie played out you'll never know it.
But Kanada's got that nice tough guy image who won't rat out this do nothing resistance, so they let him go.
Meanwhile Tetsowo leaves the hospital. He just walks out. But not before the army just ran some test on him to see if he was psychic? Why they do that? Just because?
Well Tetsowo goes to see his old girlfriend but a couple of nameless bad@$$ street punks see him and because he's weak and a punk, he gets his butt whooped and she almost gets raped. Thank goodness, Kanada is there in just the nick of time.
Oh yeah, Tetsowo is doing drugs because his guts just open up and spill out onto the sidewalk. As he realize it's all an illusion. The army comes and takes the druged Tetsowo away leaving behind his friends, important to the plot, they die by Tetsowo hands er mind ... gee I hope I didn't let loose any spoilers making it Kanada's job to go out and kill him.
So now Tetsowo is in another hospital and freaky stuff starts happening to him. More drugs, yes! but more old kids!! Is the cause of these weird events, and not drugs. Drugs given to him by the military of Japan to keep his powers in check, so it's okay that he's doing drugs. Oh did I mention that one of the old kids is the kid he crashed into 0.0 This kid who ran away at the beginning now seems content to live at the army base. WHY?? Maybe that old little psychic girl decided to give him some. She seems quite chummy with that fat old kid psychic one. I think he ran away because he wasn't feeling the love in the group. It's up to your imagination of why he ran away in the first place and got hit by Tetsowo.
Meanwhile the leader of this army and a scientist is going over the data about Akira and how Tetsowo matches. They comment on how strong Tetsowo should be compared to Akira. All in the present tense. Mind you. Which will become important and will seem very odd later on.
The leader of the army wants to know whats the best way to control Tetsowo for the good of Japan. And there's a few bits of him talking to show you that he isn't out for power but rather to protect japan.
Back at the hospital, Tetsowo has gotten rough with the three old kids and through this shake down of old child-like little people, he learns that he has psychic powers. And again he walks out of the hospital but this time he kills a number of people just because he can.
Uh oh he is enjoying it.
He goes back to the bar and kills everybody. Including his former biker gang. Wait! I forgot to mention the bar at the beginning. No wait, the bar was only seen for about a minute and it didn't have Kanada or Tetsowo in it, just random people who where going to die 30 mins later in it. Yep, I was right to leave it out.
Completely not important to the plot. Like a lot of things in this movie.
side note: The biker gang at the beginning is the clown biker gang. We finally find that out. Now that the story is almost complete.
From the shake down, Tetsowo learns about Akira. I forget either from the old kids or the army leader he learns about this guy named Akira and he sets out to free him. Of course, a bunch tanks get in the way. No problem for the newly powerful Tetsowo. The army doesn't want him to awaken Akira, but he's going to do it anyway. He's such a bad boy. ;)
After tearing up half the city, Tetsowo finally gets to Akira, only to learn that he's dead. Wait what?!
So the army built a vault and sent tanks and missiles after Tetsowo to keep him from waking up .... a dead kid. A brain in a jar no less.
Okay at this point, I'm really pissed off.
Kanada hot boy looking girlfriend gets possed by this guru and she talks about a bacteria with the power of a human to help explain Tetsowo to the audience and to a revengeful Kanada.
Not only does this boy looking girl gets posed but she also through her contacts with this useless resistance is able to get Kanada a laser rifle.
It's laser time kiddies.
Kanada tries to avenge his fallen comrades with laser action and the Army leader tries to shoot Tetsowo with a laser cannon orbiting in space. Wait? Why didn't he do that at the beginning when those tanks weren't working ... oh well, who cares.
Well both attempts fail and Tetsowo gets more powerful but wait, what's this .... He's turning into a monster. A monster that's eating up all of Tokyo! And he's now crying out for Kanada to save him.
but wait what's this those three old kids have come out of nowhere to save the day.
Kanada gets sucked into the monster and the three old kids go into it to rescue him.
inside the monster known as Tetsowo there is a montage of his early childhood of being bullied and about the kids, who got old and never grew up. At least physically.
the end.
I have watched this thing five times. Everybody loves this movie. I keep on watching it thinking, maybe this time I will see the thing everybody else sees or I will finally understand something i didn't see before. I just keep saying to myself why did I waste my 90 minutes on this crap. In reality, the only thing I found is that people invent something that isn't there. I did agree with one person's interpretation of the movie but I still didn't like. It just fails on sooo many levels story wise.
