I’ve been spinning my thoughts over in my head ever since I finally got around to watching this storied classic, and that’s the conclusion I keep coming back to. Akira is singular in a way that almost no piece of media can claim. Sure, plenty of movies and TV shows are like Akira. Plenty of anime and Western media in the decades since its creation have drawn obvious influence from its iconography, themes and story beats. The legacy of Akira stretches so far, reaching into so many pockets of today’s popular culture, that it’s not unfair to say that without Akira, the landscape of storytelling today would be completely unrecognizable. Akira is everywhere. Akira is everything. Yet at the same time, Arika is completely and utterly itself. It’s a film unlike any other, an achievement and a vision that none of its inheritors have captured in quite the same way. I could tell you a lot about things Akira is like, but I could never explain to you what Akira is without sitting you down in front of the damn thing and letting you experience it for yourself. Akira isn’t The Matrix, it isn’t Ghost in the Shell, it isn’t Psycho-Pass, it isn’t Elysium. Akira is, well, Akira. And even thirty-one years later, there’s no escaping the gravitational pull of its monumental stature.
But here’s a question to consider: if Akira is so singular an achievement that it can’t really be compared to anything but itself, then how the hell am I supposed to review it? This film has defined a generation of filmmaking in so many different ways, yet none of the works it’s inspired operate on similar enough levels to effectively measure their strengths and weaknesses against each other. There are absolutely dark, apocalyptic anime I like more than Akira, but with the exception of Neon Genesis Evangelion, none of them hold that same all-encompassing power of recognizing a landmark in the making. Is it fair to judge Akira against these works, when so much of what makes these works good is recycling and refining pieces of its own legacy? It almost feels like judging the likes of Anything Goes and Oklahoma against the modern musical landscape of Hamilton and Hadestown. Any way you slice it, things have just evolved so much from that starting point that there’s no way to judge Akira completely on its own merits anymore. It’s inspired so much through sheer cultural presence that the film itself can’t just be taken as a film anymore. How can I weigh it against the rest of my favorites when so many of my favorites wouldn’t even exist without it? Is it even possible?
I don’t know. But as is often the case in times like this, that’s not gonna stop me from trying regardless.
First, the story. For the uninitiated, Akira takes places in the post-apocalyptic future of... 2019.
*Looks around*
You know what, fair.
Okay, okay, serious mode. In Akira’s universe, a cataclysmic event tore through Tokyo in the late 80s, an explosion that seemed nuclear and was considered the start of World War 3. In the time since then, Japan has been trying to rebuild, and we check in thirty years later in the sprawling city of Neo-Tokyo that’s been built around the crater of that epic explosion. It’s a rough, rotten, chaotic place, packed to the gills with garbage, street gangs, disaffected youth, civic unrest, social oppression, and just a whole cauldron of simmering rage right on the verge of boiling over. Our protagonists, Kanada and Tetsuou, are members of a teen biker gang that roams the streets looking for trouble, getting to scuffles with rival gangs and purging the pain of their daily existence by rushing headfirst into nihilistic, live-for-the-moment thrills. It’s the cyberpunk city by which all future cyberpunk cities must be measured, a haze of neon lights and billowing trash alike. You get a very quick sense that Neo-Tokyo is essentially acting as the world’s biggest pressure cooker, building tension in every strain and scuffle and bloody body left on the street. All it needs is one final spark to set the whole thing ablaze.
And that spark comes when an otherwise ordinary brawl ends with an injured Testuo kidnapped by the military and experimented on. When Kanada finds him again, he’s got psychic powers that are starting to tear his mind apart, filling him with visions of some unknown presence named Akira. And his powers are growing, growing in size, growing in scope, growing in internal agony, transforming him from a scared, steadfast punk into a raw, bleeding nerve of vicious psychosis with increasingly apocalyptic capabilities. He sets off to find this Akira, prompting Kanada to give chase. Before he knows it, he’s been caught up in the wider conspiracy surrounding the mysterious Akira, including anti-government guerilla terrorists, previous psychic children whose bodies have all withered like old men and women despite being under the age of 10, the real causes behind the explosion that destroyed Tokyo 30 years ago, a religious death cult that sprung up around rumors of Akira’s existence, and the nature of human evolution itself, all spiraling around each other in pursuit of the same destination. And all the while, Testuo’s power only grows increasingly destructive, and his mental state increasingly unstable, as he desperately gropes his way towards a question he doesn’t even know why he needs the answer to.
It is, in short, a lot. It’s a lot of plot, a lot of moving pieces, and overlapping story threads that all require attention. And if there’s one significant criticism I can level at Akira- the one criticism that prevents me from appreciating it as deeply as I do some of the shows that it inspired- it’s that not everything gets the space it needs to breathe. I’m aware this story was adapted down from a much larger manga, and it’s clear there’s a lot of story elements that would’ve been fleshed out in more detail in the source material. As is, though, a lot of the backstory and emotional context relies a lot more on implication than full exploration. It’s never made explicitly clear what the mechanics of these psychic beings are, what connections exist between the various characters we meet from all different walks of life, what the ultimate meaning behind Akira himself is, or what the final confrontation actually results it. Certain characters show up feeling like they should have bigger parts, and then don’t outside of connective tissue. It’s a coherent enough narrative, but it’s also a big, blobby mess packed full of elements that feel under-utilized and stakes just a couple scenes shy of truly making an impact. Frankly, though, I’m not sure what better way there would be to tell this story; considering it was written and directed by the original manga’s author, it’s clear he did his damndest to fit the most workable version of this story he could into just over two hours, and a longer running time would absolutely be overkill. This might genuinely be the best possible movie version of Akira that could ever exist, but you definitely get a sense that there’s a better version of this story somewhere.
Still, focusing too much of the plot and structure feels like missing the point here. Akira didn’t become the juggernaut it is through boring mechanics. It made its impact through sheer, raw feeling. It’s a movie defined by excess, excess of plot, excess of characters, excess of clutter, excess of motion, excess of despair, excess of fury, bulging and straining at the seams of its container until it tears and releases the torrential floodwaters to drown you under. I can’t remember the last time I experienced a piece of art that felt so titanic, like I was one tiny cog in the bowels of an indescribably massive machine that blasted me with scalding-hot steam and screeched my eardrums apart with every clash of metal on metal. The experience of watching Akira is the experience of standing in the middle of a hurricane; it’s terrifying and all-encompassing and you expect your life to end at any moment, but the mere fact of you existing in that moment, in that chaos, makes you feel like a god. Coherency isn’t the point here. The point is to capture the feeling of standing on the precipice at the end of the world, feeling the cataclysm raging around you, and shouting as loud as you possibly can in defiance of it all. It is a visceral, primal scream of a film, a shriek that cuts through the darkness with no other intention than to stamp unto the heavens, “I was here.”
And sweet mother of mercy, you feel that scream in your soul. So much praise has been given to this film’s animation in the past, and now I understand why; it feels illegal that any hand-drawn animated property could achieve this level of finesse. It’s not just that the characters are animated at a full 24 frames per second, with the same fluidity of motion as real life. It’s not just that every single environment is packed with texture and detail, down to the grime and wear on every last street corner. It’s not just that the action is wild and explosive with a million things happening every moment. It’s that the characters’ movements and fleshed out and textured with a million fucking subtleties that all pass by in the space of a second, gestures and expressions and shifting of weight all taken into account. It’s that the scenery is rendered in stunning reality that paints even the grimiest alley as a bustling expression of life, down to the garbage and dust blowing in the wind and the wisps of smoke from even the smallest fire. It’s that the cinematography and editing makes this megacity feel like a living, breathing colossus, with every last window detailed and every last building drawn to completion, and every shot is packed with so many intricately patterned structures and sidewalks that it seems impossible for limited human hands to have pulled it all together. It’s that the backgrounds all seamlessly flow between perspectives and motion, with the limited 2D perspective crafting a pitch-perfect illusion of movement through 3D space. It’s that the colors are awash in catatonic neon lunacy, painting in reds and blues and yellows and greens and browns and blacks and whites and oranges and purples all at once and filling every corner of this city with its own unique hue. It’s that the chaotic, destructive psychic battles that tear the city apart take every last speck of dust into account, detailing every last individual chunk of rubble as its own unique entity swirling around this maelstrom of smoke and debris and pipes and girders and asphalt and concrete of all shapes and sizes. And it’s that all of this paralyzing detail is on frame at once, all the time, so every last frame of this movie has more sensory overload on its own than whole seasons of anime.
This is the scream of Akira, resonating through the heavens as it tears the celestial fabric apart. It’s a scream of an overstuffed and overcrowded world, overwhelmed with chaos and motion and detail and movement and cramped spaces and sensory mania, finally breaking free and destroying its very foundations with the force of its nuclear fury. It’s a film you don’t so much watch as you do suffer, letting yourself get pummeled over and over again by its unfathomable excess until the pressure breaks you in turn and you start screaming on apocalyptic fury right alongside it. The action is visceral and destructive and leaves you physically shaking at every weighty evisceration and eruption. The voice acting is raw and brutal and tears through the fabric of your mind through sheer force of will. The portentous plot expands and contracts is it delves into increasingly abstract ideas and symbolism, climaxing in a combination body horror/mindfuck that sears itself into your brain through its stunning imagery and unbearable sense of release. The moment-to-moment experience is one of staring slack-jawed as the seconds tick by and every frame is even more overwhelming than the one before. This movie bowled me over through sheer force of will. It stunned me to my core with just how much it let spill across the celluloid like blood and viscera. It is, without question, an incomprehensibly mammoth accomplishment, perhaps the most definitive vision of apocalyptic fury ever put to screen. I have no trouble believing that this was the film to jump-start a new generation of storytelling; with how utterly it demands your attention, how could it be anything less?
Akira is a masterpiece in the truest sense of the word. It’s one of those works of art that you just can’t look away from, that sweeps your feet out from under you through sheer force of will and leave you in awe of the impossible feat it accomplished. Yes, it’s a lanky, bloated, overstuffed mess of a film, and many of the stories it ended up inspiring have proven themselves much more personal to me. Hell, End of Evangelion essentially uses the same tactic of overwhelming its audience through sheer force of overstuffed apocalyptic grandeur, but with a story, characters and themes that cut just as deeply as the awe-inspiring sound and fury. But even if Akira has been outdone by the status quo it ushered in, it has in no way been overshadowed. Akira remains, through thick and thin, a testament to the sheer power of filmmaking, and I’m eternally grateful to have experienced its majesty at last.
