Singularity

Rating: 10/10 (10 October 2009)

I expected to enjoy this, but I didn't expect quite the profound experience this movie was. Pretty much the best in post-apocalyptic, science fiction, animated entertainment, with hints of cyberpunk and strong attention to detail in both the script and drawing, Akira is pretty much penultimate anime. All of the characters are very realistic, the storyline is gripping, the voice acting (both Japanese and English versions, amazingly) is great, and the action is spectacular. For a full two hours, you get immersed in a very fleshed out world (no pun behind "immersed" and "fleshed out" intended...) and experience the transcendental energies of the Universe.
One night a biker gang chasing another gang called the Clowns through the streets runs into (literally) a strange aged-looking little boy, right as public demonstrations on the street and military activity converge in Neo-Tokyo, the rebuilt metropolis of the area destroyed in 1988. Despite these disparate events, all of the elements of that fateful meeting come together as Tetsuo, the sidekick of bike-gang leader Kaneda, starts developing strange powers, attracting attention of the self-same military elements, a rogue subversive group, and of course Kaneda himself, who simply wants to figure out what happened to his friend (and also is just a little attracted to Kay, one of the subversives). It all has to do with something called Akira, which resides underneath a stadium being built and organized for the Olympics 30. Also, in the process of each character attempting to discover what's going on, corporate plots will be unraveled, governmental coups will be performed, and the landscape of Neo-Tokyo will change for a second time.
Within the animated elements as well there are gorgeous metropolitan landscapes, surreal hallucinatory effects, dazzling environments, and magical realism. I've heard that there are talks going around to make this movie into a live-action, but though CGI effects have developed enough to pull off any of the separate visual effects featured in this movie, their synthesis could never be quite as great as the way this movie looks and moves, especially since live-action bodies wouldn't really belong to the landscape that this movie creates. As a completely idiosyncratic, fully developed piece of art, Akira is really inimitable.
--PolarisDiB