My Favourite Anime: Akira - CineTV Contest

CineTV released a contest post the other day asking us to talk about our favourite anime film or tv show, and I thought it would be a good chance to talk about the first one I ever saw and that I love to this day.

Here's A Link To The Post If You'd Like To Participate

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Seeing the name I can just imagine the music in my head of the opening sequence showing off neo-Tokyo in all its dystopian glory.

I was going to add the song here but figured I may as well upload the sequence I'm referring to, for anyone who hasn't seen this film.

How I First Saw This Film
When I was about 10 I was staying in my nan's house and my uncle had a bedroom there filled with videos that I would often go through when I wanted something to watch - usually, it was Star Wars - but this day I felt adventurous and saw a box with what looked like a cartoon character on it. I threw it on and within the first few minutes of the film I was hooked.

The opening of the film shows Tokyo in 1988; the release date of the film. There is a birds-eye view of the city, then what seems to be a nuclear blast goes off, boom, we cut straight to neo-Tokyo 2019.

Instantly, we follow a random character walking into a bar, and as the camera pans through it, showing us some of the people populating this place we see a figure in the background, wearing a red jacket with a capsule on the back, Kaneda: the main character, or at least one of them.

He's called away from the jukebox by a friend who enters, and in an alley, we are introduced to the secondary character, Tetsuo: who is messing with Kaneda's bike.

Which then begins the sequence shared above ^ a bike battle between their gang, and a rival group called the clowns. This highspeed battle takes place through the city streets of neo-Tokyo, and they aren't afraid of injuring bystanders in their fight, which always stood out to me as creating a particularly brutal setting.

The more time we spend in the world of Akira, the more we get to realise that the whole place is crumbling around the people who live here. Normal people attempt to get on with their lives, as gangs roam the streets doing as they please to the backdrop of social unrest in the form of riots and demonstrations, and beneath all this anti-government groups seem to also be operating hidden by the trouble going on.

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What Is Akira?
Akira is three very different stories rolled into one, but slowly all of these stories converge.

We are introduced to some young people who seem to find entertainment in causing trouble for their rivals and anyone who gets in their way. The more time we spend with them, we see that their city has fallen apart around them, their school is dilapidated, their teachers beat them, as do the military police whom they encounter. Their idea of entertainment is clearly a reflection of what they have been taught by any and all authority figures in their lives.

Then we have the anti-government group that the main character Kaneda encounters; well, he sees a girl he likes and ends up getting involved in their fight as a way to get close to her. This group is trying to bring to light the corruption at the heart of their city, and country. In a way, they're very similar to Kaneda's group of friends but are more organised and working in the shadows, rather than causing mindless mayhem in the streets.

The third story is about what happens to Tetsuo. The biker sequence ends with him colliding with a weird-looking kid, who is in the process of being smuggled through the streets until the person helping the kid is killed by the police, as it turns out, the man who is killed is a part of this anti-government group.

The kid is some sort of government experiment, and it is revealed that he and others like him have psychic powers. When Tetsuo collides with this person, he starts to get powers too and is hauled off by some shady military people while unconscious.

As this storyline unfolds we see some pretty traumatising stuff from Tetsuo's perspective and while trying to get these new powers under control he suffers, and this plotline takes on the entire narrative. The bikers and everything else is really just the backdrop to the actual story, and the film is named after the original experiment; the one that created the massive explosion that originally wiped out Tokyo.

It's Pretty Much One of The Only Anime I Like
I really enjoyed it as a kid, and watched it a bunch of times, but never really got into any other anime. I like Attack on Titan because in a way it feels like this film. I also like Ghost In A Shell, and that's about it.

Akira had a lot of darkness to it, but it wasn't in your face, it was more subtle and in the background of particular scenes. I also like the whole backdrop of the setting, and how the whole story built to this major climax that was completely different than what the opening made the film seem like.

The animation style is amazing, and there are so many small little bits of detail in almost every shot. I find anime great for its art style; it shows us the most beautiful, ugly, and dark place imaginable and there are even certain scenes where there are small pebbles and bits of debris on the ground, even though they're very 'blink and you'll miss it' details.

Compared to most other anime, Akira still stands out, almost 40 years after being released. It inspired me to draw, but I've always been terrible at it, so decided to write instead. A lot of the settings that I write have these dystopian undertones, as I find those sorts of places interesting to dwell in for a while, and they can give rise to interesting stories and characters.

My fascination with post-apocalyptic fiction was sparked by things like Mad Max, Robocop, and the Fallout Series among many others, but at the top of the list will always be Akira; I was definitely too young to watch it back then, but I'm glad I did.

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There's Six Novel-Sized Manga's of The Story
I've had my eye on this kickass box set of the books for a while, but sadly, I am yet to get them, They're a special collectors edition of the books, and cost about 200 Euros, but as far as I'm concerned they're well worth it.

The story of Akira always felt a little bit jarring to me as a kid, like what we're getting is two separate films in one, because there's a point at the halfway mark where everything seems to change. Suddenly, all of Kaneda's biker friends are gone, and now he's working on hunting down his old friend Tetsuo.

Well, it was only years later that I realised that the reason it felt jarring; like there were two stories mashed into one was because it was two stories mashed together.

The film adaptation of the manga was created with the intention of being only one film, rather than multiple ones. So, to do this, the creators took the first half of the first book, and the last half of the last book and worked them together to make the films happen and give cinema audiences the whole story, even if it was a lot to wrap the head around.

I remember as a child, I always wished that the biker gang stuff went on longer; that we might have spent a bit more time on that section and getting to know some of the rest of the crew a bit better. Well, with these books I'll be able to, and I'm hoping it might shed a bit more light on other areas of the story and world they built and showcased in the movie.