Animation Manipulation

Rating: Null/10 (4 October 2003)

Akira wants to be smart, but, in truth, you'll find more detail and sophistication just by watching the first season to Transformers than here.
The animation isn't that good...now I've said it, here comes the lynch mob. Most of it has dated with obvious clunky movements compared to The Rescuers Down Under (arguably the best traditionally animated film of the 90s) or even Bambi. Come to think of it, anime is only a collaboration between Disney levels of detail with stories ranging from Heavy Metal to Ralph Bakshi in inspiration. Of course, the goal of animation is to present the impossible by creating a universe in the mind of the artist and translating that on celluloid.
For that matter, Akira is very stagnant in the visual department. Animation has an edge in that it can explore absolutely unknown territory, but few films have actually done that. None of Walt Disney's original work did much searching as they were focused solely on fixed artistry and construction. Only recently have animators started going around the environment to see what their world looks like. Heavy Metal marginally did this, but I'd say Roger Rabbit helped push that idea forward.
As an action movie, Akira pales next to The Killer and Die Hard because those two are a dominant benchmark for the genre. Adrenaline requires good heroes, menacing yet credible villains and technological comprehension of some kind. In Akira it is about faceless nobodys with toys that resemble beefed-up props from Terminator.
As science fiction, Blade Runner and 2001 are more sophisticated and fluid. The dialog here, both subtitled and dubbed, is totally cornball and separated from the actual plot. Instead of advancing the story, it divides and often contradicts our focus. Not only is the heavy-handed message lost in the violence, but it becomes an enormous hypocrisy. If films like this were more concerned about telling a story than blowing stuff up (or just blew stuff up and didn't try to make us think with cheap tricks) then they wouldn't be as shallow in subtexts. Others like that include Face/Off and The Rock.
Overall, if this is the best anime has to offer--doesn't look like that now with Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke getting more and more acclaim--then I'm not impressed. Foreign film's many different tones and methods aren't too dissimilar from their American counterparts because an equal percentage of them just don't work. 2.5 out of 5 stars.