Akiraaaaaaaah!!!

Rating: 8/10 (28 April 2006)

I have to admit that when I first rented this movie out in 1990, I watched it about 5 times before I returned it. 5 times in 2 days. I'd love to say that it was because of the thoughtful characterisation or the deep and intriguing plot but I'd be lying. I watched it over an over again because I had never seen anything like it before.
I now own "Akira" on DVD and I sometimes catch myself scanning certain scenes frame-by-frame, just to see how they would have looked to the Japanese animators who built the story sketch-by-sketch. OK, you could do the same thing with "Bambi" if you wanted to, but "Akira" is no Disney cartoon.
Even when Bambi's mum got shot, you never got to see any blood in Disney cartoons. "Akira" has blood. "Akira" has violence. "Akira" is literally a moving sci-fi comic book. Today you could turn it into a live-action CGI-packed blockbuster, but in 1988 the only way to make a movie like "Akira" was with conventional animation. The resulting film is visually spectacular.
The Neo-Tokyo cityscapes in "Akira" have sometimes been compared to those of the "Blade Runner" version of Los Angeles. This is more due to the "Blade Runner" set designers basing their vision on Tokyo circa 1982 than the later movie copying "Blade Runner". Both movies take a dystopian view of the future, but the genetically-engineered nightmare of "Akira" has a uniquely Japanese perspective.
This means that it's not a movie for everyone. Mark Stephen Johnson, however, has watched "Akira" as many times as I have. In Johnson's 2003 live-action movie "Daredevil", there is a blatant copy of the sequence where Kaneda runs headlong at an advancing Clown gang member riding a motorcycle. Kaneda then jumps onto the front of the bike and kicks the Clown out of the saddle. DareDevil does exactly the same thing to Bullseye, shot-for shot in Johnson's movie. Who says cartoons aren't influential?