But yeah I actually liked Akira. In fact, I think it's pretty friggin great! Some of you...don't agree with me. So I'm here to make a case for Akira being actually enjoyable, and not just appreciable for its technical achievements.
Now I will admit, this movie should come with a disclaimer.
Warning: The following feature film aint gonna make no sense unless you've read the manga.
Because really it doesn't. Sure, you can follow the series of events. You can gleam meaning from characters and actions. But the fact is, we are dealing with about 1/3 of a story here. Akira the Manga has been chopped up, rearranged, and bent over backwards in its transition to Akira the Anime. There is no way to fully comprehend the story from the film alone.
And that's okay.
Because the story isn't what makes this film enjoyable anyway.
Akira is, and is meant to be seen as, a fantastic visceral experience.
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| Pun Intended. |
Akira presents the viewer with a beautiful, fully realized world to immerse themselves in. The one billion yen budget (yes, with a B) allowed the creators freedom to create a world as detailed and flowing as the one we ourselves inhabit. Characters move their entire heads while speaking, not just their mouths. Backgrounds are animated in perspective, along with the characters. Lights play brilliantly off the scenery. It's telling that, after thirty years of technological advancements in animation, Akira still manages to astound today.
It occupies the realm of films which seek to stun their audiences with bold and unique sensory experiences. Within this realm, you find films like Gravity, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The plots of these films, if you really broke them down, are not very good. It's the brilliant presentation of the bizarre and nonsensical worlds of these films that makes them classics. Gravity, for all intents in purposes, is about a lady who needs to get back to Earth, only it's really hard, you guys. But the way Alfonso Cuaròn subjects us to every frenzied breath, every sickening tailspin, every violent collision, brings us closer to the protagonist than any film could. Other films take us into their creator's minds, while others still seek to place us into another world, a twisted mirror of our own. Akira is one of the latter.
It is when you let go of the conventional notions of films having to "have plots" or "make sense" that you can start to fully enjoy Akira. Experience it as you would experience a ride at Disneyland. Nobody gives a shit about why those multicultural animatronics are singing, where the Dumbo clones with the convenient seat holes came from, or how exactly there can be a mountain in space. So why do you care about where they all went at the end, or why those kids are green, or what Kaori's point in the film was?* Just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Or you could just read the manga, I guess.
* um so obviously Kaori's role is to show the death of innocence in Neo Tokyo, like duh
Cameron,
ReplyDeleteI would like to say that I completely agree with you on how it stands today. Akira, to me, is very enjoyable to watch. And I feel like it suppose to be in our eyes. Our eyes are not of the viewers that first watched this, so at the time they never experienced something like Ghost in the Shell to compare to. I feel like that watching Akira in the time that we did, it makes our viewing less enjoyable as people who had seen it before us, because all we would think is how confusing the storytelling is (btw which I enjoyed) and how this was the origins of some characters or some plot of another movie. Perhaps if we did not see it this way, we would appreciate Akira more as a feat of animation and film.