#FILMFRIDAYS: AKIRA

Year: 1988

Dir: Katshuiro Otomo.

From time to time, I hear people say that anime/animation is for kids;That adults who enjoy them are simple-minded and need to grow up. It is wrong and honestly quite insulting. It is stupid to think that the use of a medium of storytelling can somehow limit the emotional/intellectual range of the storytelling itself. Some of the most expansive, exploratory, and ironically human films ever conceived in cinema have been made through this limitless medium.

Over the next couple of fridays — if laziness and lack of words don’t find me — we will be discussing selected anime gems that debunk the anime-for-kids fallacy. To do this, we start with Katshuiro Otomo’s cyberpunk opus.

Akira is set in Neo-Tokyo, 31 years after a terrible explosion during the world war III engulfed the whole of Tokyo. It follows the story of Kaneda and Tetsuo, friends and members of a bike gang whose lives change when Tetsuo collides with a strange child during a clash with a rival gang. Tetsuo is taken by a government facility and begins to develop dangerous psychic abilities beyond his control. Kaneda must now save his friend from the government and also from himself.

Explosive, exhaustive and visually resplendent, Akira is considered a cultural milestone in anime. It was the most expensive anime ever made at the time and was responsible for the infusion of the genre into popular culture. Otomo’s masterpiece, although a homage itself to classics like Blade Runner, would go on to influence and inspire future works all over cinema from The Matrix to Stranger Things.

But Akira is more than just an R-rated neo-punk fest of blood, bomb and breast. It is also a anti-nuclear weapons allegory set after Hiroshima/Nagasaki and set during the tense period of the cold war; An anti-war metaphor for a post-war japan. It is timeless art but also a timely warning for an increasingly unstable and selectively forgetful world.