"Akira": Appreciating Influence

[vid87]

Thanks to Toonami, I finally saw the famed anime masterpiece "Akira"...I thought it was pretty good. The thing that bugged me (besides some character and plot elements I just didn't like/understand) was the fanfare describing this as an "original vision" and "influential."

First I'm stating for the record that I don't mean that like "Narnia's plot is stupid, it rips off Harry Potter!" chronological ignorance - this was 1988, long before we started organizing tropes and made sci-fi and fantasy more familiarized and routine. The problem, though, is that I do live in a timeframe where I have been exposed to many of the plot, design, and character elements seen in this film and it noticeably sours my appreciation for it (though like I said I still enjoyed it, especially that psychotic climax). I want to understand why it's so well regarded, but I feel that requires extensive background knowledge of the industry and films up to that point that even then won't really help things. It's like showing a kid born in the late 2000's "Toy Story" and explaining to them how your mind was blown when you first saw it, only for them to think it looks like ass compared to the modern cgi stuff they're familiar with.

Can appreciation for influence be learned? Are there great works that you simply won't understand no matter how hard you try? What do you think of Akira?

 

[GiantRaven]

You should read the books to get the full experience/story. The film is utterly truncated and nonsensical by comparison.

 

[[Kira Must Die]]

I liked it alright. I think I respect it more than I do really enjoy it. To me, it's a fun action sci-fi thriller, but all the psychological/philosophical stuff that people rave about I don't think hold up very well, especially compared to some of the stuff that came out later. Also, I'm not a fan of the art-style. All the characters have these huge foreheads and tiny, close-together eyes. Although I'm not a terribly huge fan of the movie itself, I do admire it for what it's done for the industry and the influence it has.

Also, I thought some of the music was rather silly. It's literally a choir going "DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN DUN DUN!", or people chanting "Kanedaaaaa... Tetsuooooooo...!" which makes me giggle.

 

[vid87]

] Although I'm not a terribly huge fan of the movie itself, I do admire it for what it's done for the industry and the influence it has.

That's the thing, at least on my part - I'm not sure what exactly is "influential" about it. Was the whole "humans are evolving" thing relatively new to sci-fi anime? Was there something particularly important about the design of the city? Was it just more over the top and gory than other stuff up to that point? Without a better frame of reference, I can't be sure why it's considered great and can only take it for what it is.

 

[BeeGeenie]

]I liked it alright. I think I respect it more than I do really enjoy it. To me, it's a fun action sci-fi thriller, but all the psychological/philosophical stuff that people rave about I don't think hold up very well, especially compared to some of the stuff that came out later. Also, I'm not a fan of the art-style. All the characters have these huge foreheads and tiny, close-together eyes. Although I'm not a terribly huge fan of the movie itself, I do admire it for what it's done for the industry and the influence it has.

^This. You can appreciate a thing without actually liking it. All the characters look hydrocephalitic, but it's still an interesting piece of work.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

It was one of the first pieces of Japanese animation to make a big splash in the west, and probably /the/ first to do it intact, as opposed to hack jobs like Robotech -- big enough, in fact, that it got a theatrical release in the US, which even today doesn't happen for anything but new Miyazaki movies, and only then because Disney is distributing them.

That, and the absolutely gorgeous animation, are the main reasons it's such a big deal. I can't say I've ever heard of the plot and so on being influential, just that it was well animated and is basically responsible for the pre-Toonami era of the Western anime fandom as we know it, along with a few other things like Ninja Scroll and Ranma 1/2. But none of those other things were as influential on the fandom as Akira, they were more the things they discovered after Akira let them know they existed.

 

[vid87]

It was one of the first pieces of Japanese animation to make a big splash in the west, and probably /the/ first to do it intact, as opposed to hack jobs like Robotech -- big enough, in fact, that it got a theatrical release in the US, which even today doesn't happen for anything but new Miyazaki movies, and only then because Disney is distributing them.

That, and the absolutely gorgeous animation, are the main reasons it's such a big deal. I can't say I've ever heard of the plot and so on being influential, just that it was well animated and is basically responsible for the pre-Toonami era of the Western anime fandom as we know it, along with a few other things like Ninja Scroll and Ranma 1/2. But none of those other things were as influential on the fandom as Akira, they were more the things they discovered after Akira let them know they existed.

Appreciate the background info and absolutely agree on the animation - Miyazaki definitely came to mind when I saw how fluid it was, especially the climax I mentioned, which looked like something he would have done on a really big acid trip.

 

[nuttshell]

Oh no, that movie was like a short burst of psychotic vomit. Read the books, they actually make sense and there is something called pacing in there, too.

(Yes, I read the manga first)

 

[Zykon TheLich_v1legacy]

It's one of the few anime films I can bear to watch.

It's probably due to it being well animated and not too heavily stylised, no big old googly eyes or any of that other shit and also being cyberpunk/sci-fi in comparatively down to earth way...well, except that last bit. It came along at the right time, towards the end of the 80's with the likes of Blade Runner and Running Man so that sort of film had more mainstream acceptance and it felt like it was another one of those that just happened to be animated.

 

[WoW Killer]

Great film, and that's despite it being massively inferior to the books. You have to understand, the plot in the original Manga is way too complex to put into a single movie; you'd need two or three films at least to cover it all properly. So it's an incomplete version of the story. Most obviously, the title character hardly makes an appearance; he's got a much more important role in the books.

Thematically, I don't think it's all that original. The cyberpunk and sci-fi themes had been done before in Western films and literature. One of the other major themes is that of a society living in the wake of a catastrophe, with the obvious (and very Japanese) analogy being Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's an analogy that's been used before in Japanese media, most notably in Godzilla. However it's worth mentioning that the original Godzilla was changed quite drastically for Western audiences, taking a lot of the emphasis away from the topic of nuclear war. So perhaps Akira was a bit braver in stating that same idea.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

It was one of the first pieces of Japanese animation to make a big splash in the west, and probably /the/ first to do it intact, as opposed to hack jobs like Robotech -- big enough, in fact, that it got a theatrical release in the US, which even today doesn't happen for anything but new Miyazaki movies, and only then because Disney is distributing them.

That, and the absolutely gorgeous animation, are the main reasons it's such a big deal. I can't say I've ever heard of the plot and so on being influential, just that it was well animated and is basically responsible for the pre-Toonami era of the Western anime fandom as we know it, along with a few other things like Ninja Scroll and Ranma 1/2. But none of those other things were as influential on the fandom as Akira, they were more the things they discovered after Akira let them know they existed.

Appreciate the background info and absolutely agree on the animation - Miyazaki definitely came to mind when I saw how fluid it was, especially the climax I mentioned, which looked like something he would have done on a really big acid trip.

I always like to describe it as the result of Walt Disney making an R-rated Sci-Fi film, and Miyazaki would be an acceptable substitute

 

[FPLOON]

Great film, and that's despite it being massively inferior to the books. You have to understand, the plot in the original Manga is way too complex to put into a single movie; you'd need two or three films at least to cover it all properly. So it's an incomplete version of the story. Most obviously, the title character hardly makes an appearance; he's got a much more important role in the books.

^This.
That isn't to say the movie's bad, per se (I mean, even re-watching it for the first time remastered, it still looks pretty awesome if you don't think too deep into its overall plot), it's just there are multiple moments where the manga has the more upper hand, in terms of explaining it's own story... If Akira was made today, it would have gone the route of The Hobbit, hands down...

However, what still holds up this adaptation as being one of greatest anime movies of all time... is because of how ground-breaking a success the movie was in the west when it first came out, with an animation that just as fluid as what modern traditional animation is was as well as an anime movie that doesn't rely on cheap shock value (debatable, I guess) or sex appeal (hands down) to keep you invested throughout...

 

[KungFuJazzHands]

I was a damn impressionable youngster when I first saw Akira, and I can still remember how blown away I was by it. Of course, that was only a year or so after it had been released in the US, so its impact was pretty fresh. Akira definitely doesn't hold up as well technically nowadays, but it still has a pretty deep psychological impact on me (that could be due to the fact that I've read the graphic novels dozens of times since my first viewing of the film, and therefore have a deeper understanding of the philosophy behind the story).

Everything about it was so different from most of the crap that passed for anime back then -- the music, the animation style, the background story, the mature content. It's had a huge influence of a whole host of artists, musicians, movie directors, and novelists. It single-handedly brought modern Japanese animation to the attention of western audiences.

To pass Akira off as just another anime is severely underestimating it.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Great film, and that's despite it being massively inferior to the books. You have to understand, the plot in the original Manga is way too complex to put into a single movie; you'd need two or three films at least to cover it all properly. So it's an incomplete version of the story. Most obviously, the title character hardly makes an appearance; he's got a much more important role in the books.

I don't know how popular the comic was in Japan before the movie got released, but I think it actually played around very adequately with the character of Akira. In the books he just emerges from the sphere like it's nothing, which always struck me as a bit odd. I mean, did they just put a fully clothed child in a colossal metal container? Whereas in the movie (if you've read the comic beforehand) you obviously expect something to come out of that sphere after it gets broken apart in such an epic fashion, only to find the vaccuum sealed physical residu of Akira. And to me, The omnipotent presence of Akira in the movie felt more powerful, than the mute child with no real presence at all from the comic.

Also, one of if not the only anime to feature full-on lip synching, which the industry still refuses to do despite how it makes characters 5 times more expressive.

 

[hermes]

Don't want this to sound like a critique to the quality of the movie, but most of the influence was not about the writing or even the animation. Most of the influence was commercial and cultural.

The movie was the first massive success story of a Japanese animated movie in the west. It opened the doors to a lot of anime to try in the west, even when it wasn't related. It created an audience. Before that, pretty much the only exposure the western mass market had with anime was in the form of hacked up versions of series like Macross or Robotech.

Because of that, its impossible to consider the influence without taking into account the context within history, even more than the issue of quality or originality. To do so would be like dismissing The Great Train Robbery's influence as a movie because, by today's standard, it looks silly.

 

[WoW Killer]

If Akira was made today, it would have gone the route of The Hobbit, hands down...

Definitely. You'd probably need a trilogy to get the full effect of the books.

The omnipotent presence of Akira in the movie felt more powerful, than the mute child with no real presence at all from the comic.

That goes back to the nuclear weapons topic. In the comics, Akira is a WMD, to put it plainly. His antithesis, and the only safe way to dispose of him, happens to be an equally powerful WMD, Tetsuo. So the whole story is kind of a statement on nuclear deterrence. In the film, you're right, Akira is kind of a deity figure.