10/10 but if i had to be critical i think it's actually a 8.5 or 9/10. i don't think we'll ever get another movie like AKIRA and it means a lot to me.
this isn't a typical review. i like the movie. i recommend it. i want this to focus on a fictionkin perspective. i'm in the movie. at least a version of me is. this movie is an interpretation of events that happened to me, i want to write about my personal relationship to it.
AKIRA is an animated movie directed by Otomo Katsuhiro and released in Japan on July 16, 1988. it saw a limited US release on December 25, 1989.
Neo-Tokyo, 2019 A.D., 31 years after WWIII. The beginning of the movie follows a motorcycle gang led by Shōtarō Kaneda. Kaneda and I are childhood friends. I look up to him but at the same time have this inferiority complex surrounding him.
One night I go after some guys from an opposing gang, the Clowns, to prove something. I end up crashing into a psychic kid who had been kidnapped from a government lab by anti-government resistance members. This awakens latent psychic powers within me and the rest of the movie is spent following my awakening, Kaneda who's trying to find me and Kei who gets wrapped up in this as a resistance member trying to find "Akira."
A lot of action, political unrest, commentary on humanity and hubris. 2 hours of visual perfection.
The completed film is ~160,000 pictures in total, the soundtrack was performed by Geinoh Yamashirogumi, it "invented" many new colors due to it being mostly night scenes, it used prescoring which was relatively new, it's one of the most influential films ever created, it pioneered animanga in the West...
This movie is as an adaptation of the manga which was only half-finished at the time of production. Otomo never planned to adapt AKIRA into an animated film. The original manga is forgotten by most fans of the film and might as well not even exist. Despite the fact the first episode precedes the movie by almost 6 years.
A lot of people complain that the film makes no sense, is too short, whatever.
What is this movie from my perspective? It's just a movie, not accurate at all. I see myself in it but I don't look at it and think "I vividly remember going through this" because I didn't. Not like that anyways. It's an adaptation simplifying everything because it had to. You can't fit 4 volumes into 2 hours.
Everything in the movie is familiar. It's still AKIRA. It's surreal to see Kaneda moving, speaking with a voice that sounds like his. Or this depiction of Neo-Tokyo with lights everywhere and neon glowing. Some of the film has helped me piece noemata together even if it isn't "canon" to me.
There's also Kaori and I. In the movie we're together and in the manga it's kind of like that too. With how much the manga tells things accurately, it gets her and me wrong. Beside the romantic implications, I can think about what it could have been like if we were friends because of the film.
I always like noticing exactly from which volume most of the movie's plot come from. Volume 1, Volume 2, back to Volume 1. Even then the end of the movie isn't that similar to Volume 6 when compared. The only similarity is that I die, but I never died in the stadium.
During my yearly rewatch in April, most of my time was spent thinking about these differences and experiencing noemata. I always end up coming away from the movie having fun. It doesn't tell an accurate story but I get to see some different version of events. I get to rewatch the best movie ever.
I'm grateful to this film despite not thinking it's accurate or "canon" to my fictionkinity. That doesn't matter. Without it, AKIRA never would have entered my life. I never would have awakened to being fictionkin. This movie is the peak of humanity. It's sad that it gets stripped of what it's actually about so people can easily digest and shit it out through stupid, overdone memes.