Amoebas don't build houses

Rating: Null/10 (13 February 2013)

Japan. The near future. Tetsuo, a young street urchin, begins to develop psychic powers. Local authorities believe him to be the successor to Akira, a dangerous psychic responsible for a nuclear explosion which decimated Tokyo 31 years ago. Akira is currently in cryo-freeze, cocooned in a heavily guarded bunker several miles below the earth's surface. The Japanese military want Tetsuo securely locked away with him. Attempting to rescue Tetsuo is Shotaro, the leader of a rowdy biker gang.
Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, "Akira's" one of the more influential Japanese science fiction animes of the 1980s. The film featured a larger budget, more animation cells and more fluid motions than was commonplace in Japanese animation at the time, and would go on to influence a number of directors, amongst them James Cameron and the Wachowski "brothers". And as is typical of sci-fi anime, our cast are a bunch of loudmouth kids who can't stop yelling, and the film spends most of its time salivating over machinery, vehicles, computer screens, urban landscapes, urban alienation and apocalyptic imagery.
Japanese animated films tend to be preoccupied with adolescent metamorphosis. Japanese culture is itself plagued with a specific form of infantalism. They've dubbed this phenomenon "hikikomori", which refers to a large, growing subset of the Japanese population who essentially refuse to "grow up", take on responsibilities or enter the workforce. In most cases this rejection of adulthood is due to a perceived, socially exacted trauma. To millions of Japanese men and women, the adult world has been discredited, is traumatic, offers little, and is already a nightmarish, pseudo-robotic, cyberpunk nightmare which offers nothing but anxieties and phony social expectations, interactions and demands. They ditch it all. Caught between the cosy, stable traditions of Old Japan and the schizoid dystopia of New, the hikikomori choose to remain protectively cocooned and stuck in limbo. Mamoru Oshii's anime, "The Sky Crawlers", deals indirectly with this arrested development.
"Akira" is, in a way, also about extended adolescence and the anxieties of growing up. The film's biker gangs are populated by naughty kids, led by Shotaro, their own daddy of a leader. Shotaro constantly admonishes his boys for trying to "grow up" and "be big like him", but he's no more childish than the other figureheads in the film (some of whom are literal babies). Tetsuo, meanwhile, wants to break free, his adolescent metamorphosis mapping a passage from puberty and impotency to power and authority (he literally gets bigger and bigger, increasingly large and powerful). Everyone else wants Tetsuo infantalized and frozen, like little Akira, cryogenically frozen as a child and presumed nonthreatening, but Tetsuo won't have this. He fights them off, conquers his uncertainties and confusions, but goes positively nuts whilst doing so. From this point onwards, anxieties very specific to Japanese culture pop up: the fear of too much power in the wrong hands, of nuclear annihilation, of urban sprawl, of technology's smothering of tradition, the threat of overreacting leaders etc. Indeed, it was around the mid 1980s that Japan began to gain technological prominence and redefine itself. In many ways, "Akira" is tapping into a zeitgeist that was perhaps weary of its growing technological power and influence. And so Tetsuo paradoxically resists his metamorphosis whilst also revelling in power, an internal power struggle which eventually becomes too much for him to bear. From this point onwards the heroes of Japanese anime would get increasingly impotent, self-reflexive and stuck in existential ruts, until you reach the self-loathing heroes of "Evangelion" and "Sky Crawlers", social outcasts in giant robots who can't even muster the will to fight.
"Akira" was based on a 2182-page manga by Otomo himself. The film sports a number of atmospheric passages, but its attempts at depth, nuance and scope also clash awkwardly with the demands of a teenage audience. Aesthetically, French comic-book artist Jean Giraud is a massive influence, as he was upon "Blade Runner" (to which "Akira" is oft compared) and Hayao Miyazaki (who adored him). Fans of "Akira" hate its English dub. Oshoro's next feature, "Steamboy", traded "Akira's" cyberpunk for steam-punk.
7.9/10 – Worth two viewings.