The Grandmasterpiece of All Modernist Anime

Rating: 10/10 (20 January 2007)

This is the film that started it all in terms of innovation and layered, modernist animation.
It defies pretty much all classical mainstream western animation stereotypes, which simply makes it all the more appealing to youth culture the world over.
Upon the first few glances of Akira, one might easily wonder where the animation staff behind it got their ideas for the film, which came primarily from Blade Runner. As has been well documented, Akira was created through a painstaking process that took creator/manga auteur Otomo Katsuhiro roughly ten years to complete in terms of the manga. All the hard work over in Tokyo paid off, because Akira, in terms of vision and story, is a flawless, well-executed anime film in every sense of the word. It is one of the most complex and well documented anime of all time.
Akira's story revolves around a secret government organization in Neo-Tokyo that is conducting mysterious experiments on certain members of a Neo-Tokyo biker gang and young children. The narrative kicks off with an extreme wide shot of a nuclear explosion which demolishes contemporary Tokyo, thus plunging the world into World War III.
Unlike many other, less ambitious anime titles, Akira is indeed fully animated, with vibrant flashy backdrop lights included in a Blade Runner-esquire metropolitan manner. The use of color in this film is nearly hypnotic in its radiance, making for much eye candy on many levels. The dubbed sound editing is eloquently executed as well, with a brilliant voice-over performance accomplished by then-obscure Johnny Yong Bosch, who plays Kaneda, a member of the Neo-Tokyo biker gang. There are many other notable VO performances in this film; however, Bosch delivers one of the most memorable.
Akira is a mature film in every sense of the word. It's smart, beautiful, and intense, with partial nudity and a bit of disturbing imagery here and there. Quite simply, Akira is one of the all time anime classics, and a great title to start off with if you don't normally watch anime. It managed to set the bar quite high for the entire ocean of post-Akira manga and anime that followed. It's the kind of film that The Matrix WISHES it could be. Akira is worthy of the highest rating possible.
As for the package itself, the casing is beautifully done, with many behind-the-scenes features that will easily use up a lot of your time if you watch them. Even without the "making-of" features, the film itself stands alone as a Wonder of The World among high brow cinema.