The difficulty in watching classics is to judge them fairly in the time they were released.

The positive side is, while I have limited knowledge of 1980s animation, it is not too hard to see how the _Akira_ excels in the animation quality, even today, particularly in the very first sequences with Kaneda's Capsule gang driving though the city night lights, and the climax with [spoiler]Tetsuo's blowing up to a gigantic mass and the extradimensional inflection with the ESPs[/spoiler].

The excellent animation is used masterfully for conveying the atmospheric world-building: the sky-high lives of Neo Tokyo with a drab scummy lives of its citizens, brutal police forces, and economic insecurities painting the world bleak. Perhaps the strongest aspect of this film that I wished they could've took us a walk a little bit further like the politician Nezu took us in a stroll around the city. And like _Blade Runner_, watching through the film I recognised how the plot points and the themes raised in this film would later be used very familiarly in many other science-fiction films, thus setting up the cyberpunk genre in the years to come.

However, speaking of plot and story, I would say that perhaps writing is not the aspect this film shines on. Characters leave much to be desired. They feel like devices for the plot to move forward, even with our main characters Kaneda and Tetsuo, and even the McGuffin Akira.

While I appreciate the film doesn't blurt out everything and treat the audience as smart, some genuine questionable plot points left me wondering: why did the ESPs lure a certain character? What was really the reason of the rebellion? What's the point of the last sequences with politician Nezu and the opposition Ryu? The film seems to save some points for a future setups (that seem to be never realized) and the awkward fade to blacks between scenes and unexplained sequences made me feel like I'm missing out something and have to check Wikipedia - something that I realize later that I have to find out in the source material (manga).

As the credit rolled, my mind wander, not unlike Tetsuo's, the possibility of remake (even a live action one) that could amplify the excellence of this film and connect the half-painted tods. That being said, _Akira_ is still a masterful cornerstone of science fiction/cyberpunk material that deserves at least a watch in a lifetime.

Well I just watched this for the very 1st time and I can already tell that this is a film that needs to be watched more than once to be fully understood and appreciated. When you watch this you really have to make sure that you're completely focused on it. Honestly from the moment the plot starts to pick up I already felt like if you turned attention away for only a second, you would probably miss a crucial detail. I actually even found myself rewinding certain scenes just to be absolutely sure that I understood what just occurred. I never even read a plot synopsis before watching this, so a lot of the story's moments were unexpectedly quite shocking and disturbing. All I'd seen before was a clip of the opening showing the bike chase, so that probably left me expecting a completely different atmosphere and story. I will admit I was not wowed by the story to the point I wanted to jump out of my seat but the movie really left me in a deep state of thinking wondering how certain things were meant to be interpreted.

One aspect I find unique was that there really was no hero or villain at all. Every single character had a big focus on their flaws, with their strengths receiving less focus, most likely to hammer in the fact that not a single character is meant to be portrayed as hero. I thought the Colonel was going to be the main villain but honestly he just makes the most logical decisions given the circumstances. I found myself thinking there was a lack of exposition, I was wishing I knew more of the characters' pasts, near the end we see a whole bunch of flashbacks that I felt would've been placed better at an earlier time but meh that feels like nitpicking. Part of me felt like the story was a bit abridged but that's understandable since I read this was made while the manga was still ongoing but that doesn't soften the blows from the themes of rebellion, creation, destruction and power in this movie.

The quality of the animation blew me away, not reusing any character animations, having their lips actually match the words that they're saying. Japanese animation must have reached an all time high when this was released, if I hadn't known the year this was made I actually wouldn't believe it was a product of the 80s. If Akira was made today using same techniques as in 1988, it would probably be so immensely expensive that it would make any publisher studio shit their pants. My favorite parts would have to be watching Tetsuo mow down every single thing they threw at him, I honestly found it comically amusing, and the incredibly well animated chase scene at the start.

I imagine that back during the times this was made there weren't much dark, gritty, disturbing and grotesque moments in anime and that Akira most likely set the stage for the future animes that contain those aspects. It's easy to see how this influenced future cyberpunk animes such as, Ghost In the Shell and Cowboy Bebop. I wonder if Final Fantasy 7 had some inspiration from Akira? FF7's Jenova, Midgar and bike scene came to my mind as I watched. The entire time I was really reminded of Blade Runner, which ironically is another film that I found to be one of those that needs to be seen multiple times to be fully appreciated and understood.

I would've gone into major plot details but I'd rather leave that for when I at least have one re-watch. I might come back and edit in my thoughts on that. Oh and did anyone else have a difficult time telling the Colonel and Ryu apart?

[8.4/10] The hardest thing for a movie to do isn’t to convey an idea or to convey a feeling; it’s to do both at once. There’s the rational part of our minds that ferrets out plot and theme, and there’s a more instinctive side that connects more closely to the feel of a given moment or story writ large. The two bleed into one another, and influence one another, but it’s hard to blend them together without losing something in the mix.

*Akira* achieves that blend with an impressive force. It seems odd to say given how opaque and liminal the film is at times, but it combines palpable notions of the costs of unrestrained progress and scientific advancement, with more primal and societal anxieties about overwhelming power and dalliances with self destruction.

It calls to mind two other works that wade through the same waters: *2001: A Space Odyssey* and *Twin Peaks: The Return*. It shares the former’s concern with man dabbling with forces it can neither control nor comprehend and its ties to the creation, destruction, and transcendence of our species. It shares the latter’s nuclear fears and sense of a people still reeling from the demonstration of the devastation we are capable of, mixed with a more personal disorientation and loss. And it shares both’s trippy and elliptical sensibilities, where impressionistic sequences convey the things which cannot be articulated in dialogue alone.

It’s the images in that vein that are going to linger with me the most. I will remember the nightmarish childhood playthings garishly reconstructed from a mass of swirling detritus, looming over Testuo’s hospital bed. I will remember the bulging grotesqueries as Testuo’s organs swell and expand, creating some ungodly fetal creature consuming and destroying everything in its path. I will remember the scenes of citywide destruction -- practically a currency in modern day blockbusters -- made all the most ghastly and visceral in context and with the films impossibly great visuals.

*Akira* can lay claim to being one of, if not the, most stunningly animated features of all time. There’s a fluidity and realism amid such a heightened atmosphere, made manifest in the artwork and aesthetic that suffuses the film. While some of the individual character designs are a little too odd or caricatured, the lighting, framing, movement, and use of color throughout this film are all magnificent. The grit and grime of Neo Tokyo, the visceral unrest as a city unravels before it explodes, the neon lights in dingy industrial hovels come together to catch the eye at every turn. Even for those who understandably have trouble connecting with *Akira*’s somewhat opaque narrative, the visuals alone are worth the price of admission.

Those visuals convey the sense of an abject, unnameable sort of fear. I’ll admit to getting lost in moments where the film’s characters discuss essential energies and memories coded in the fabric of the universe, with a human’s powers being imbibed by an amoeba. But particularly in the turbulent year 2020, it’s not hard to connect with and relate to a persistent sense of a people on the brink of something beyond their control, half hoping for some kind of salvation and another half ready to wipe the slate clean. There’s a simmering anxiety beneath everything that happens in *Akira* whether you’re girding for war or trying to tear it all down. That comes through loud and clear.

It is not, however, an aimless fear. I can’t claim to have an intimate knowledge of Japanese culture or history, but it’s hard not see the lingering scars in the national psyche left by Hiroshima and Nagasaki in *Akira*. That’s easiest to see in the imagery of mushroom clouds and boundless destruction. But it also comes through in the combination of awe and terror over “Akira” and what his power represents over the course of the film, and the steps various individuals take to contain, unleash, or understand that power.

It also connects to the notions of science and its pursuit going too far, leading to a pushing of limits that threatens to rend humanity itself in twain. The heroes and villains of *Akira* are hardly clear cut, with almost all of them having understandable motivations and flaws. (Some, like Kameda, are actually flat out annoying.) And yet the film seems to pin some particular blame on not just broken institutions, but on the quest for academic and scientific knowledge for its own sake with destructive ends and consequences left ignored. I’m apt to grouse about the anti-intellectual fervor that reflects, but it’s churlish to complain about that perspective for a film produced in a country who were the “beneficiaries” of some of the greatest scientific minds devoting themselves to the Manhattan Project.

In that vein, *Akira* does not skimp on the violence. Its plainest point is that there is a cost to this sort of power. The energies, the kind at the core of life which Kei waxes rhapsodic about, harken to the atom itself, and with it, the decimation when it was split. With that spirit in mind, the film does not shy away from bullet-ridden revolutionaries or bystanders taken apart with a mere thought. It is startling and graphic, but not gratuitous. The concept of collateral damage, lives lost in the wake of such forces, are endemic to the movie's themes and its choice not to flinch from such violence grounds the idea.

Nevertheless, for as haunting and disturbing as the imagery of loss and devastation here are, and as potent as the film’s themes of pre- and post-nuclear annihilation are, its ending is strangely hopeful. Despite the massive casualties, it closes on a sense of renewal, redemption, and most of all transcendence. I couldn’t begin to explain that ending to anyone, or account for the cosmic mechanisms and rebirth that it suggests. But I can tell you how it feels, to see a friendship vindicated amid horrors of both body and mind, to see self-sacrifice by child-like gods to demigods protect the innocent, and to see the chance to move on from the end of the world. For a movie so rooted in terror and destruction, it feels strangely but movingly optimistic.

It has been said that when Oppenheimer witnessed the first atom bomb test, he said, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." This may actually be a mis-translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, which deals with illusion and impermanence. Nevertheless, the sentiment that great achievement in science, like great power, carries great responsibility, remains true.

Yet to date, homo sapiens has consistently shown that it is not ready for this dilemma. The string of films and sci-fi novels that deal specifically with this subject is long and varied with many excellent examples: Lang's Metropolis, Robert Wise's The Day the Eartch Stood Still, The Terminator, Blade Runner, and Ex-Machina to name just a few.

Akira is another, very well-done, classic in this field. The story-telling, the themes, the action, and especially the jaw-dropping animation are masterful, and likely unequaled in the genre. The animation alone is a magnus opus.

**Technically very good, but so confusing that it doesn't work.**

I'm 33 years old and my childhood saw the popularization of Japanese anime in Europe and the West thanks to hits like “Dragon Ball” and others. However, I have to say that, even as a child, I hated this type of highly stylized animation, so different from what I was used to seeing.

Even so, it is necessary to grant this film some value. The animation it brings us is of excellent quality and very well designed, and the perfectionism typical of Easterners is clearly evident in the attention given to the smallest details, scene by scene. As has been the hallmark of modern anime, it has a lot of action and moves in a futuristic, dream-like environment, much to the liking of the Japanese. In fact, it is quite remarkable that they are a people so attentive to the future and so respectful of their own traditions and their past... a good example of how both things are not incompatible, quite the contrary, a sign that we can build the future without cut with the past.

The problem with this film is that, until now, I haven't been able to understand the story. It's confusing, and the feeling I got is that the creators focused so much on the action and technical execution of the drawings that they totally forgot to do all of this based on a logical story, capable of being followed without difficulty. Is there something that I, with a Western mindset, have not been able to understand? I don't know. I just know that this film, regardless of its technical value, didn't work for me.