[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.