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The Future Is Not A Straight Line...
Akira also anticipates the recent evolution of Hollywood comic-book movies. It has the manic violence of The Dark Knight (there’s even a biker gang dressed up as clowns), but the film is closer to Marvel franchises like X-Men and Spider-Man. Akira’s monstrous character Tetsuo is a youngster who finds horrific forces mutating his body. Peter Parker shoots out embarrassing strands of web-goo, but Tetsuo’s whole body engorges into a swelling, seething, liquefying ball of flesh. Akira further foreshadows some of the TV show Heroes, such as the season one set-piece where a radioactive man goes uncontrollably nuclear.
None of which is surprising, given Ôtomo’s love of American pop culture. He said of the first Akira collection that, “I wanted the page-count, the contents, the paintings, everything about it to create a deep, full, American comic-style world.” Archie Goodwin, Marvel editor-in-chief during the 1970s, noted that, “Akira seemed to fit the tastes of American audiences... Ôtomo was dealing with a science-fiction story, which they like, but he was also dealing with beings with paranormal powers, which is a popular theme in American comics and science-fiction now.”
Akira also anticipates certain Hollywood comic-book films in its overstuffed plot. The film compresses hundreds of manga pages, originally published over several years, into two dazzling but very confused hours of animation. Subplots and support characters are truncated or plain forgotten: plot points are vague, even contradictory. Perhaps it was just the difficulty of compressing such a long strip, which hadn’t even been finished when the film was made. It also seems possible, though, that Ôtomo wanted to throw in extra twists to surprise fans of the manga. For example, the “Akira” that Tetsuo unearths in the film is very different from the one he finds in the strip.
And yet, this messy plot is a big part of Akira’s fascination. More than any sci-fi film since Blade Runner, it hurls the viewer into the middle of a world that bleeds from the screen in multiple hinted backstories. The action scenes are a blend of bloody carnage and information overload. The first 15 minutes serve up (in rough order) the end of the world, a new metropolis, rioting students, biker thugs in high-speed chases, and paranormal beings fleeing from sinister men in black, the whole heady montage overlaid with TV news reports and dog-food commercials. The spectacle takes on muscular momentum, driven by the brilliant score by the group Geinoh Yamashirogumi that’s full of explosive breathing and clacking percussion. Later in the film, an empowered Tetsuo fights his way through tanks and helicopters, taking on a supergirl on a huge, metal globe as giant pipes and energy beams destroy the surrounding infrastructure. Then a military satellite comes into play and the battle goes into outer space.
A Ghost In The Machine
Akira demands to be seen on the big screen. Harry Knowles, founder of Ain’t It Cool News, remembers, “College theatres got hold of that film and just played it over and over and over. It became a midnight thing… When I was at college, Akira and Ghost In The Shell (the next big anime film import) played forever.” Akira became a true midnight movie, befitting an action film that often feels like an endless fever dream. In Britain, too, many viewers first caught Akira at one-off cinema showings around the country. One of the first to see it was Andy Frain, former marketing manager at Island Records, who checked it out as a possible commercial proposition. “It blew me away,” he said. “I’d never seen anything like it. It was like an animated Blade Runner, clearly not for children, but a well-crafted, philosophical movie that happened to be in animation.”
America had enough of a Japanese animation fanbase for Akira to be released on video. In Britain, where anime was almost unknown, Frain set about creating a new brand. “I started thinking Akira was more than a great film; it might be a phenomenon. Were there more films like this in Japan? If so, we could treat them like a record label, like Def Jam, a genre in itself. Nobody in Britain knew the names of the films, the names of the directors, anything about them other than that they were brand new (for Britain) and that if you enjoyed one, you were likely to enjoy others.”
The result was the so-called “manga” cartoon brand that was unleashed in Britain in the 1990s. (Asked if he considered using the brand name “anime”, the Japanese word for animation, Frain replied that the phrase “anime cartoons” would be like saying “film films”; “We were giving a doff of the cap to the original comic source.”) A few years later, Frain’s new company, Manga Entertainment, would co-produce another sci-fi Japanese animation, Ghost In The Shell, which would be one of the main inspirations for The Matrix.
In the years after Akira, Manga Entertainment caught flak for its emphasis on sex and violence, which fans said misrepresented the medium. But “anime” was equally stereotyped as violent animation in America, at least until Pokémon and Spirited Away arrived a decade later. The apocalyptic vision of Akira seared its way into the global consciousness, even in parts of the world torn by war. In 1993, a Japanese critic was walking through bombed-out Sarajevo when he was amazed to see a mural from Akira on a crumbling wall. In the panel, one of Ôtomo’s scowling teen bikers glared out at a world gone to hell.
The caption: “So it’s begun!”
http://www.empireonline.com/features/the-story-behind-the-film-akira
Akira also anticipates the recent evolution of Hollywood comic-book movies. It has the manic violence of The Dark Knight (there’s even a biker gang dressed up as clowns), but the film is closer to Marvel franchises like X-Men and Spider-Man. Akira’s monstrous character Tetsuo is a youngster who finds horrific forces mutating his body. Peter Parker shoots out embarrassing strands of web-goo, but Tetsuo’s whole body engorges into a swelling, seething, liquefying ball of flesh. Akira further foreshadows some of the TV show Heroes, such as the season one set-piece where a radioactive man goes uncontrollably nuclear.
None of which is surprising, given Ôtomo’s love of American pop culture. He said of the first Akira collection that, “I wanted the page-count, the contents, the paintings, everything about it to create a deep, full, American comic-style world.” Archie Goodwin, Marvel editor-in-chief during the 1970s, noted that, “Akira seemed to fit the tastes of American audiences... Ôtomo was dealing with a science-fiction story, which they like, but he was also dealing with beings with paranormal powers, which is a popular theme in American comics and science-fiction now.”
Akira also anticipates certain Hollywood comic-book films in its overstuffed plot. The film compresses hundreds of manga pages, originally published over several years, into two dazzling but very confused hours of animation. Subplots and support characters are truncated or plain forgotten: plot points are vague, even contradictory. Perhaps it was just the difficulty of compressing such a long strip, which hadn’t even been finished when the film was made. It also seems possible, though, that Ôtomo wanted to throw in extra twists to surprise fans of the manga. For example, the “Akira” that Tetsuo unearths in the film is very different from the one he finds in the strip.
And yet, this messy plot is a big part of Akira’s fascination. More than any sci-fi film since Blade Runner, it hurls the viewer into the middle of a world that bleeds from the screen in multiple hinted backstories. The action scenes are a blend of bloody carnage and information overload. The first 15 minutes serve up (in rough order) the end of the world, a new metropolis, rioting students, biker thugs in high-speed chases, and paranormal beings fleeing from sinister men in black, the whole heady montage overlaid with TV news reports and dog-food commercials. The spectacle takes on muscular momentum, driven by the brilliant score by the group Geinoh Yamashirogumi that’s full of explosive breathing and clacking percussion. Later in the film, an empowered Tetsuo fights his way through tanks and helicopters, taking on a supergirl on a huge, metal globe as giant pipes and energy beams destroy the surrounding infrastructure. Then a military satellite comes into play and the battle goes into outer space.
A Ghost In The Machine
Akira demands to be seen on the big screen. Harry Knowles, founder of Ain’t It Cool News, remembers, “College theatres got hold of that film and just played it over and over and over. It became a midnight thing… When I was at college, Akira and Ghost In The Shell (the next big anime film import) played forever.” Akira became a true midnight movie, befitting an action film that often feels like an endless fever dream. In Britain, too, many viewers first caught Akira at one-off cinema showings around the country. One of the first to see it was Andy Frain, former marketing manager at Island Records, who checked it out as a possible commercial proposition. “It blew me away,” he said. “I’d never seen anything like it. It was like an animated Blade Runner, clearly not for children, but a well-crafted, philosophical movie that happened to be in animation.”
America had enough of a Japanese animation fanbase for Akira to be released on video. In Britain, where anime was almost unknown, Frain set about creating a new brand. “I started thinking Akira was more than a great film; it might be a phenomenon. Were there more films like this in Japan? If so, we could treat them like a record label, like Def Jam, a genre in itself. Nobody in Britain knew the names of the films, the names of the directors, anything about them other than that they were brand new (for Britain) and that if you enjoyed one, you were likely to enjoy others.”
The result was the so-called “manga” cartoon brand that was unleashed in Britain in the 1990s. (Asked if he considered using the brand name “anime”, the Japanese word for animation, Frain replied that the phrase “anime cartoons” would be like saying “film films”; “We were giving a doff of the cap to the original comic source.”) A few years later, Frain’s new company, Manga Entertainment, would co-produce another sci-fi Japanese animation, Ghost In The Shell, which would be one of the main inspirations for The Matrix.
In the years after Akira, Manga Entertainment caught flak for its emphasis on sex and violence, which fans said misrepresented the medium. But “anime” was equally stereotyped as violent animation in America, at least until Pokémon and Spirited Away arrived a decade later. The apocalyptic vision of Akira seared its way into the global consciousness, even in parts of the world torn by war. In 1993, a Japanese critic was walking through bombed-out Sarajevo when he was amazed to see a mural from Akira on a crumbling wall. In the panel, one of Ôtomo’s scowling teen bikers glared out at a world gone to hell.
The caption: “So it’s begun!”
http://www.empireonline.com/features/the-story-behind-the-film-akira
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