It's Friday night, y'all. Time for #wenchwatches !
Tonight: #akira1988
I'm pretty sure that I've see Akira at least once before, likely a TV edit back in the early 2000s. I remember being...confused by it. Whether that was because of my unfamiliarity with genre conventions, the awful TV edit, or the dubbing, I cannot be sure.
So, let's give it a watch.
Needless to say, what I'm watching tonight is a more modern remaster. Widescreen, subbed, and an utterly *gorgeous* transfer.
The Clown themed biker gang our protagonists fight I swear must of inspired Batman Beyond's Joker Gang.
The way the cycles move, with their prominent light trails reminds me of Tron, only 6 years before this film.
It's hard to put into words the impact this film had on USian viewers. Like Ghost in the Shell -- which came *after* this one -- it helped create the demand for animation directed to an adult audience.
It's overt violence, style, and gore made it clear from the start that "This is not for kids". No doubt USian conservatives latched onto those same qualities for their own moralizing and proselytizing. It was often included as a bullet point in the Satanic Panic.
Even so, Akira helped to establish animation as a *medium*, not just a target audience. And who could deny it? The animation is a technical achievement.
......welp. There's the part that Ghost in the Shell borrowed from.
Several parts.
Can't blame them for the callback either. That was a *damn* fine piece of animation.
One thing I'm noticing in the first half of this film is the politics. If this were a USian film, I'd be expecting more than a few sympathetic cop characters. Here, there's none of that. The violence and brutality is on full display here.
Perhaps that's yet another reason conservatives targeted it so.
Wow. That elevator was later called back to from Evangelion.
Which is odd, because a few sources told me that in Japan, Akira was considered a so-so film.
Another thing I'm wondering watching this is how there's a distinct sense of a metaphor baked into the center of this film. The scene with the council distinctly speaks of the post-war period. In-film, this is for World War 3, circa 1988. The film takes place in 2019.
However, let's place this in the time of the film itself: The film was released in 1988, likely developed the year earlier. And based on a 1982 manga.
1982. 37 years after....1945.
Akira is spoken of as a seed at the center of Neo Tokyo which will wipe the city away. There's a sense that it's a power of a God, one that was accidentally harnessed. One we don't want to do so again uncontrolled. Gojira had similar notes, but I'm not Japanese, I'm not even informed enough of the culture itself beyond secondhand sources to be sure if my read has any merit.
There are bits of this which feel like it influenced Dark City (1995), a personal favorite of mine.
@socketwench - Akira really comes across as ground breaking animation and hugely influential in the US, but like you said, had a so-so reaction in Japan.
Japan had had cinematic animation for a while by the time Akira came out. The Macross and Dirty Pair movies are lovely to watch (And a few of the Urusei Yatsura movies, while not as detailed, had been out a half decade before all these). So when Akira released, for them "it was Tuesday."
For us, though...Streamline took a chance releasing Akira theatrically, and while it was critically panned, it at least showed the US audience that "animation for adults is a thing, and it can be great looking if you you put money into it."
I know those of us in the C/FO were celebrating Streamline's release in the US. Sadly, I think it was the failure of Akira in the US Box Office that kept Troma's (absolutely straight) dubs of the Studio Ghibli movies from being released outside of a few test runs in Austin. We had an almost ten year way before Disney would pick up that thread.
