A masterpiece of technical animation

Rating: 9/10 (17 December 2007)

As we approach 2012, the year designated by the Mayans in their calendar as the end of our present age, more and more people are beginning to come to an awareness of our multidimensional reality. Just recently an article in New Scientist magazine reported that an essentially empty area of our universe has been discovered nearly a billion light years across, implying the presence of a second universe beyond our own. Coming just a few weeks after other scientists drew the conclusion that parallel universes, which exist in the same area as our own but in overlapping space, may be real. This new discovery amounts to a shift in our understanding of reality.
I was thinking about this while watching Akira, the breakthrough Japanese anime doomsday fantasy by Katsuhiro Otomo from 1988 in which the old order has broken down and strange and powerful forces are working to propel the planet into a new universe. A masterpiece of technical animation, Akira is also a complex and challenging work of art that baffled Western audiences when it first appeared in 1990 but who appreciated its exciting animated style. At that time, animation was considered in the same vein as a children's cartoon, without artistic or intellectual substance but Akira changed that perception to the degree that anime in the 90s became one of Japan's chief cultural exports.
The film opens in a post-apocalyptic Tokyo in 2019, 31 years after World War III. Adapted from Katsuhiro Otomo's long running manga comic book (originally published in a teen magazine), Akira complements its non-stop action and explosive violence with recognizable human beings who can express complex emotions. While the film also contains a political thread in which young people rebel against authority and seek freedom from oppression, the plot is not as significant as the magnificent colors and the quality of the animation.
The main character is Tetsuo, a member of a teenage biker gang (bosozoku) led by his friend Kaneda Shotaro. The film revolves around Tetsuo's relationship with Kaneda. Growing up together, Kaneda has always comes to his aid, but the situation has fostered both Tetsuo's dependence and resentment. During a motorcycle ride, Tetsuo encounters a strange psychic child whom he later learns has been frozen into an unnatural aged childhood as a result of group experiments with telekinesis. Tetsuo's encounter with the child unleashes his own telekinetic energies and the story becomes one of his growing powers developing against a background of civil riots, terrorism, and government crackdowns.
Taken captive by government scientists who experiment on him, Tetsuo is transformed into an unrecognizable creature that can unleash super powers, capable of doing considerable harm to himself and others. Escaping across the city in search of "Akira", the entity rumored to be the most powerful of the group of child mutants, Tetsuo becomes a lonely outcast cut off from his friends, then disappears. As the screen is filled with silence, a radiant white dot comes down from the sky and we hear in voice-over the words "It's begun". What has ended and what has begun may not be fully understood until five years from now.