A Well-Thought Out Beautiful World

Rating: 7/10 (3 August 2015)

I'll start off by saying that the concept behind Akira is extremely interesting and I will be sure to check out the Manga to find out more about the film and it's background. In addition to this it is animated beautifully. What the film lacks is consistency in it's execution, which I should say won't bother most people, in fact I think this film is pretty entertaining but I don't review based on entertainment I review based on execution.
The thing about this film that irritated me the most was the inconsistency of sound mixing, particularly footsteps. The way footsteps are integrated into the environment is a little absurd, I have never heard footsteps as well-defined as the ones in Akira, and as well as this the surfaces on which footsteps can be heard is incredibly inconsistent. It's a pretty minor thing but if you notice it it's really annoying. I have to say the score is pretty great, it's intense and well-used. There are places where the integration of the score into the environment is a little awkward but forgivable. A big problem with sounds mixing was the use of silence. This is mainly due to the fact that once the silence is brought on it doesn't stay. Rather than remaining in silence the film moves in and out of silence without changing location, which could be believable if someone was causing this to happen, but the change in volume was too abrupt and awkward.
While the film is animated beautifully the use of depth of field in like 10 shots out of 5000 or so, is really distracting. When the rest of the movie is animated as if everything is in focus and then there is one out of place shot, where someone or something is out of focus is really odd and like I said distracting. As well as this the editing is really weird in some spots. Example, a character is being swallowed up and the film slowly fades to black as character gets swallowed, cuts to the events outside, and then cuts back inside where the environment is no longer black like before but as bright as the outside, and then fades halfway to black before cutting back outside. It's not something most people notice but for me it was a really odd thing to watch.
I have to give props to the writers for being incredibly intelligent in their adaptation from manga to anime. There are quite a few things that aren't fully explained within the film, but the world that exists withing the movie isn't able to explain those things to you and so I personally felt satisfied with not fully understanding all aspects of the plot, because even the characters sometimes don't understand what has happened. I saw the movie with a friend who has read the manga and told me most of the things I didn't fully understand were explained in the manga, so the move to adapt the world presented in the film as slightly different to the manga was very intelligent.
Overall intelligent, well-thought out, beautifully animated and entertaining, check it out, especially if you've never seen any anime before, this film is a great bridge into that kind of thing.