In 1988, the medium of animation — tragically misguided after its
lengthy silver age — was up for grabs. The hands that would grab it came from
far away and across an ocean.
It was not a great year for American animation. Disney was in a
terrible decade-long slump; its mega-hit The
Little Mermaid, which would put it back on track, was still a year away.
Director Don Bluth had some success with An
American Tail and The Land Before
Time, but his films, while darker and edgier, still resembled sub-par
Disney projects. Television cartoons were mostly a bust; they were becoming
cheaper and uglier, and had hardly progressed since The Flinstones in ’60s.
Then came a rebirth with three animated movies within three
different genres, all from Japan :
Isao Takahata's historical drama Grave of
the Fireflies, Hayao Miyazaki's whimsical fantasy My Neighbor Totoro and Katsuhiro Otomo's dystopian science fiction Akira. Any one by itself could have
tilted animation's fortunes in Japan 's
favor, but here were three within months of one other. It was a cultural
revolution.
While Totoro and Fireflies are fine movies — if you
haven't seen them, I suggest you carve some time out for them; bring tissues
for Fireflies — Akira is the movie that still resonates with powerful clarity
today.
The film, set in Neo-Tokyo 30 years after World War III, has its
roots, like Godzilla before it, in
World War II nuclear hysteria. Meddling with powers beyond our control, and
beyond humanity's calling, are common themes in post-War Japanese films, and Akira is no exception. Gritty
graffiti-tagged streets and sprawling electric cityscapes are mashed together
in the film's dystopian setting, where a biker gang with Tron-like motorcycles terrorize the streets amid an anarchist
rebellion.
Troublemaker Kaneda, leader of one of the gangs, is sent into the
vast military industrial complex of the city when his friend, the weakling
Tetsuo, is infected with an energy weapon named Akira that turns him into a
doomsday device. (By the way, the English dubbings are awful, which you will find out when you listen to Kaneda and Tetsuo's back-and-forth. My recommendation: watch it in Japanese with English subtitles.)
Despite its straightforward story — biker kid versus his best
friend — the film makes a hard left about halfway through when it turns into an
all-out fantasy bonanza with Tetsuo having hallucinations of teddy bears with
bio-luminescent milk-blood and his increasingly dangerous telekinetic powers
that turn one of his arms, and later his whole boy, into a purple mass of veins
and organs. The stakes grow and grow, from the survival of the biker gang all the way up to the survival of the whole city of Neo-Tokyo .
Nothing is safe by the end, in which all of civilization is at stake. It ends
with a new Big Bang, not kidding.
For a variety of reasons, even amid some bizarre plot twists, Akira works. I credit the animation,
which has all the anime tropes — the spiky hair, large and expressive eyes,
exasperated staring — yet also an emphasis on realistic physics. Sequences of
exploding bridges and obliterated military hospitals are incredible examples of
the film's understanding of real-world objects and how they can be drawn into a
film. Even by today's standards, CGI and all, the animation is fluid, effective and dazzling. It helps that Akira's animators
have given their sci-fi world a lived-in nuts-and-bolts feel, like Star Wars and Blade Runner before it.
Akira also marked a
more adult examination of animated storytelling, one that the anime subgenre
would overplay dramatically over the next 25 years with increasingly violent
and perverse titles both inside and out of the mainstream anime culture. "Japanese tentacle porn" pretty much sums that up. And that's just scratching the surface. Before cartoons became even stranger in Japan, thank the Internet for its wider distribution, Akira had enough swearing, gory violence, sex and nudity, and the climax's gruesome biological
mutations to fill the film's 120 minutes; even today it feels raw and audacious,
and far removed from Disney's wholesomeness.
Mostly, though, Akira
is entirely committed to its far-fetched story, itself based on director
Otomo's manga series. Never does the action, editing and composition, animation
or the film's signature visual identity waiver, even as the plot veers into
wacky end-of-days fear mongering and nuclear-based quantum physics. Or when
Tetsuo turns into a giant pulsating bio-mechanical blob. Even the music, with
its percussion-heavy first act and the now-classic duuuuhn-duuuuhn-duuuuhn of the Akira weapon give the movie a
distinct personality and character.
Still to this day, it's one of a kind. And in its success you can
trace almost all of modern-day anime, from Ghost
in the Shell to Pokémon, neither
of which have Akira's momentous
presence or its explosive technical achievements. Now that it's 25 years old,
see it again, or maybe for the first time. It's a daring movie for a genre that
rarely seeks out adventures this mature.
