Akira
This movie just might be the most commercially successful film I've ever reviewed. At one time it was, and perhaps still is, the largest grossing film in Japanese box office history.
The movie is set in Neo-Tokyo, 2019 AD, 31 years after World War III. Tokyo has been rebuilt into a gargantuan, teeming metropolis. Its a city on the brink of chaos, barely held together by military rule.
In the midst of student protests, police brutality and general unrest are Kaneda and his motorcycle gang. They could care less about disrupting the government. All they care about is meeting their rivals out on the highway and taking them on.
That all changes one night when a younger member of the gang, Tetsuo, has an encounter with a strange boy out on a lonely highway. The boy that Tetsuo encounters is part of a secret government project and Tetsuo is suddenly endowed with limitless psychic power.
Now, the government wants to experiment on Tetsuo to see if they can harness the power that he contains. Kaneda joins up with an anti-government group to try and find his friend. I'll leave the rest of it for you to see.
As you can probably tell by the picture, this is an animated movie. It certainly isn't a cartoon. It is one of the most detailed animated films ever. It was filmed at an unheard of rate of 30 frames per second. That comes out to over 150,000 cels of animation. No other animated film comes close.
The film was directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, who adapted it from his own manga, or comic book series. He streamlined the plot for the movie to make it easier to follow. That being said, it might take a second or third viewing to really get into all the aspects of this movie.
This movie contains a wide range of subtexts, from the nature of humanity to the evolution of human conciousness to the decline of modern Japan due to becoming
Westernized. All this might seem like too much to take but believe me, it is a well crafted story.
CDWH