Ninth wonder of the wrold

Rating: Null/10 (1 September 2004)

Akira was THE FIRST Japanese animated movie (and to date one of only 3) to be made for and reach, the art-house movie theaters of Europe and America. At a consistent 26 frames per second, with no cheating (panning and zooming on static artwork) it's still the only one to do so. Akira, like most "anime" of the time had a storyline borrowed in part from the Novel: "Neuromancer" and from the Japanese experience with American nuclear "weapons". Most Anime features (such as "Laputa - Island in the sky") have some reference to annihilation by thermonuclear holocaust. In Akira, the agency of Neo-Tokyo's second destruction ( the first being WW3) is 11 year old AKIRA, a boy with magical powers. Years later, in the ruins of the Megacity (mainly culled from 2000AD's Judge Dredd series) known as Neo-Tokyo, young Tetsuo Shima finds himself the focal point of a re-activation of a nebulous, nefarious scheme involving PSI-abilities.
AKIRA was originally as an 8 book series. The movie explains -SOME- plot points of books one through four. And does a good job to boot. But no 2 hour(plus) movie could encapsulate the whole story. And it is a story - not a saga. Events in both Akira the movie and Akira the book, move at an extreme pace. Multiple characters have simultaneous events that affect the storyline along a fractured, dangerous fault-line.
What impresses most about this movie is not, the violence - which directors like Paul Verhoeven have mirrored in the mainstream, nor the breathtaking action. What made myself and my friends pay attention to this piece of celluloid, was the ability of this filmcrew to let a story develop, beyond the bounds of belief, and revel in it. We had not seen this before. Seldom have we seen it since.
To answer the question: why is it the ninth wonder of the world?
Akira was one of the last animated movies to be scripted, drawn and coloured by hand.
Now look at your hand.