Akira
 Mike Toole  rates it:    

Since its release on U.S. shores in 1990, Akira has defined anime for much of the American public. The ultimate adventure film? Raiders of the Lost Ark. The pinnacle of mafia films? The Godfather. The absolute apogee of theatrical Japanese animation? Akira.

Its legacy is not entirely undeserved. Anime has a reputation for being visually excessive, and Akira takes that to the absolute maximum-- with a multimillion dollar budget (HUGE money for anime in the 1980s), creator/director Katsuhiro Otomo was able to put his original manga story to film without sparing a single expense or detail-- and he made damn sure to get EVERYTHING in there, from the perfect lip-synch in the Japanese version to the startlingly detailed backgrounds to the jaw-droppingly lush animation. In every way, Akira is all about superlatives.

To be fair, the movie is not perfect. It's actually a highly truncated version of the first part of the manga upon which it's based. The movie's initial release was actually hampered somewhat by an entertaining but spotty dub translation, which left many viewers with a lingering sense of confusion about the actual story of the movie. For a long time, Akira suffered the same sort of reputation as the Dune feature film-- it was viewed as a story so grand and epic that a single movie simply could not begin to contain it.

Now, eleven years after Akira's original stateside release, it looks like every single flexible problem about the movie, every noticeable flaw, has been corrected. The film itself has been cleaned, retouched, and remastered. The audio has been fixed and improved. The subtitle translation, fixed. And the dub is a whole new and highly improved animal-- we'll touch on that in a bit. But this is not a Star Wars-style retouching, with added or altered scenes-- it's still essentially the same Akira that drew many of us to anime as a medium.

The actual story, now free of the murk of the original dub, is surprisingly cohesive-- long after a catastrophe has destroyed Tokyo, Akira begins with a tense motorcycle chase between two rival biker gangs in the now-rebuilt city. The enormous amount of detail and fluid animation in this single sequence alone has had great influence on animation in general-- direct homages to it have shown up in fare like Batman Beyond. One scene in particular, of protagonist Kaneda deftly stopping his high-performance bike by jamming on the brakes and turning it perpendicular to the road, is one of the most popular shots in the entire movie-- and by this point, probably a defining moment in action cinema in general, right up there with Steve McQueen's motorcycle getaway in The Great Escape, and Harrison Ford fleeing from a boulder in the aforementioned Raiders.

At this point I'm gushing, but there's quite a lot to gush about. But to get back to the story-- Kaneda and Tetsuo are the two main characters. The former is a cocky, confident teenaged delinquent with a supercharged ride and his own biker gang. The latter is an orphaned kid from the same neighborhood and in the same biker gang, who views Kaneda with a complicated mixture of awe, admiration, and loathing. Not a surprising attitude, since Kaneda alternately indulges Tetsuo and shoves him around. These kids spend most of their time popping pills, getting into vicious brawls with rival gangs, and otherwise cruising around the shell of Tokyo, which looks like a cross between Bladerunner and Hell during a hailstorm.

It's an utter coincidence that kicks things off-- while getting the best of rival gang the Clowns, Tetsuo ends up narrowly missing a kid in the road, and wipes out, badly injuring himself. Before Kaneda can investigate and get help for his friend, Tetsuo (along with the strangely old-looking child) is spirited away by the military.

It turns out that the Tokyo of tomorrow has a lot of problems-- protests and riots by the restless population are constant, politics are utterly corrupt, and the police react to everything with almost casual brutality. Kaneda is taken to jail after the mishap with the Clowns, and while he's there he meets Kei, a member of an organized resistance group determined to topple the corrupt government by seizing their most secret (and powerful) weapons-- the kid Tetsuo almost crashed into, as well as his companions, who all happen to be stunted (hence the youthful appearance) but incredibly powerful psychics. The most powerful of them? Akira, the one who turned old Tokyo into a crater years ago, and who is now regarded as a local legend.

Things snowball quickly, with Kaneda trying to locate Tetsuo while simultaneously attempting to impress Kei, not to mention the terrible experiments that the military's scientists decide to perform on Tetsuo-- experiments that will give him godlike psychic powers, and drive him completely insane. Given great power and stripped of his inhibitions, will Tetsuo smash the corrupt leaders responsible for his condition? Or will he lash out at his abusive friends and at the rest of the city? The answer is a little of both, and the culmination is the return of Akira himself.

The new dub is absolutely terrific, with sterling performances from Jonny Yong Bosch (Vash in Trigun) as Kaneda, Joshua Seth (baby Knives in Trigun) as Tetsuo, and Wendee Lee (Faye in Cowboy Bebop) as Kei. My favorite performance in the new dub is from James Lyon, who invests the character of the military's colonel with a craftiness and sternness that the original dub actor lacked completely. Also notable is the use of actual kids to play the child-psychics, which brings the dub closer to how the original Japanese version sounds. Along with a vastly improved translation, this new dub of Akira is as close to perfection as we're liable to get.


The DVD's production values are also remarkable-- it's almost completely progressive-scan, which makes for very crisp, high-resolution images. Pioneer spent a million dollars cleaning up this movie, and it shows-- the animation damn near leaps off the screen, and is still superior to almost everything I've seen, even today. You can particularly see the difference by viewing the trailers on the extras disc, which are grainy and muddy-sounding as hell. The raft of extras is huge enough to have its own disc, and it's crammed absolutely full-- there's a one-hour production report, a half-hour interview with director Katsuhiro Otomo, sound clips with narration by composer Shoji Yamashiro, thousands of pages of production materials, original trailers, and a feature about the film's recent restoration. (I should point out that the interviews with the English voice cast are much, much too short.) To fully enjoy every aspect of Akira-- dub, corrected Japanese version, and all of the extras-- would literally take about six hours. It's immense.


Akira influenced animation on both sides of the pond. See? Heh heh. See?!

I've never really understood the high regard in which many fans have held Akira over the years-- to me, it's always seemed visually impressive, but garbled and directionless. After watching this disc, however, I can say that Akira is just a gem that's been in need of some polishing. Now that it's restored, it shimmers and just about jumps out at you. This film is an anime milestone; not only has it influenced a generation of cartoonists and animators (see above for a perfect example), it has set a standard in detail and quality that has yet to be surpassed-- there's no reason to avoid taking it in. Not anymore.

Added:  Friday, October 17, 2003

Related Link:  Pioneer Animation
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