A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

The Evaluation System Reviews by Title Reviews by Date

Reviews from Video Reviews of the Classics Personal Background

Title: Akira

Date of theatrical release: 1988

Details:

Voice talents (English voiceover):

Johnny Yong Bosch

Joshua Seth

Wendee Lee

Sandy Fox

Emily Brown

Written and directed by: Katsuhiro Otomo

Score: 0

The Review: Early (allegedly classic) Japanese anime chock-a-block full of future images at once interesting, opaque and boring. Situated in the near future several decades after a nuclear bomb takes out Tokyo (detonated in the Olympic Stadium), but still surprisingly close to the local environs of greater Tokyo (I guess radioactive debris has been written out of the plot, such as it is), this rather long animated feature is a melting pot of several quite different themes (but there remain still some disturbing phase boundaries unmelded). It is in part a story of marauding motorcycle gangs (with some pretty high-tech bikes!), in part a psychological biography of what happens to a junior gang member when he gets caught up in the resurrection of Akira, in part a semi-humorous geek love story, in part a stereotyped military coup in the process of taking over central Japan, in part a paranormal thriller with telepathic mutants being manipulated by the military, in part the odd and only partially understandable philosophical rebirth and development of what might be a new transcendent god, and in part a curious treatise on wraparound physics (allowing one of the characters to hold a universe in the palm of his hand, or so it seems) -- whew! But all this is quite a bit jumbled on first viewing, and is not sufficiently compelling that you would want to immediately jump back onboard.

The animation quality is rather simplistic, but the dynamic range on the screen is substantial, and the imagery of future grungy Tokyo and Akira's battleground is pretty good. But these were not enough to carry my interest.

Lots of "deep background" fleshes out a feeling for the time, including ongoing protests, strikes, rebellion against the government, several factions spying on one another -- all twisted together, sometimes confusingly so. One of the curious features of the DVD is that you can enable an explanatory graphic to appear whenever important background is visible (but effectively concealed, to those of us linguistically challenged) as Japanese graffiti; clicking a button stops the movie and provides a translation. This is a cute option and a good use of DVD programming.

(15-Aug-04)

Back to the chronological list of reviews