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Akira (1988) Artist-writer Katsuhiro Omoto began telling the story of Akira as a comic book series in 1982 but took a break from 1986 to 1988 to write, direct, supervise and design this animated film version. Set in 2019, the film richly imagines the new metropolis of Neo-Tokyo, which is designed from huge buildings down to the smallest details of passing vehicles or police uniforms. Two disaffected orphan teenagers - slight, resentful Tetsuo, and confident, breezy Kanada - run with a biker gang, but trouble grows between them because Tetsuo resents the way Kanada always has to rescue him. Meanwhile, a group of scientists, military men and politicians wonder what to do with a collection of withered children who possess enormous psychic powers, especially the mysterious, rarely-seen Akira, whose awakening might well have caused the end of the old world. Tetsuo is visited by the children, who trigger in him the growth of psychic and physical powers that might make him a superman or a super-monster. As befits a distillation of 1,318 pages of the story so far, Akira
is overfull of character, incident and detail. However, it piles up
astonishing set-pieces: the chases and shoot-outs (amazingly kinetic,
amazingly bloody) benefit from minute cartoon detail that extends to
the surprised or shocked faces of the tiniest extra; the Tetsuo monster
alternately looks like a billion-gallon scrotal sac or a Tex Avery mutation
of the monster from The
Quatermass Experiment; and the finale, which combines flashbacks
to more innocent days with a destruction of Neo City and the creation
of a new universe, is one of the most mind-bending in all s-f cinema. First Published In: The Good Times issue not known Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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