In the closing moments of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, a woodcutter and a priest reconcile as the duo tends to an infant amid the rubble of a dilapidated city. Sunlight pierces a passing storm, illuminating the figures’ resolve towards optimism and progress. With his film, Kurosawa contends for the necessity of civilization’s perseverance, an argument made especially relevant in post-WWII Japan. Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s Akira, however, argues within progress lies the prospect of peril.
The didactic of Akira has never strayed from the forefront of the collective conscience. Originally conceived in the haze of the atom bomb, Otomo opted to adapt his original manga as he quickly found his narrative to only grow more relevant throughout the eighties. A stylistic bombshell upon its 1988 release, the film obliterated prior presumptions of what kind of message an animated work is allowed to tell. In a vein similar to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Akira is a sharp criticism of the bubbly, technological joy much of the modern world found itself intoxicated by as it simultaneously warns of humanity’s self-destructive redundancy.
Following an explosion of apocalyptic proportions, Neo-Tokyo is born out of a city’s corpse. Colossal skyscrapers congest the perimeter of a massive crater, a daunting metaphor of society’s persistence in the face of irreparable damage. Despite these daunting marvels, corruption, anarchy and crime pulses through the city’s veins. Violence is a constant as if the rise of Neo-Tokyo merely muffled the fateful explosion rather than quenched it. New developments like super weapons and hyper-speed motorcycles only work to enable the societal phoenix’s grizzly form.
Baptized in the embers of the sleepless city, Kaneda (Mitsuo Iwata, Johnny Yong Bosch) and Tetsuo (Nozomu Sasaki, Joshua Seth) run amok as they chase tail and feud with rival Bōsōzoku. The former the leader of their pack, Tetsuo struggles to emulate his spiritual brother. After a skirmish finds the tandem fleeing from the police, Tetsuo speeds into a gray-skinned boy before he is consumed by a ball of fire. Desperate to make sense of what just transpired, Tetsuo is abducted by military personnel while Kaneda and the rest of their group are taken into custody. Whereas Kaneda endures the laughable procedure of Neo-Tokyo’s authority, Tetsuo is unwilling instilled with a seed of incomprehensible power.
Tetsuo’s metamorphosis is ignited by painful fever dreams of childhood memories and dark prophecies. An abrupt outing in an attempt to reconvene with his friends is abruptly cut short as horrific, Cronenberg-like hallucinations begin to infiltrate his psyche. Here, Otomo warns of the salience of violence, its relentless grip polluting all Tetsuo once held dear. In one moment Tetsuo buckles onto the ground as he perceives his bowls bursting out of him. His efforts to subside the image are moot as his control over the affliction is likewise useless. Any reference to his past life can only rattle in vain, killed at the hands of his toxic rebirth.
As Tetsuo is permanently altered, the bureaucrats of Neo-Tokyo likewise lose their control. Impotent amid a cascade of civil unrest, they are as primal as the denizens they scold beneath their city’s underbelly. Though largely ineffective, two figures of dissenting ideology attempt to remedy Neo-Tokyo’s corruption. Seeking to do so through militaristic force is Colonel Shikishima (Tarō Ishida, Jamieson Price), a disgraced official is insulted by the “bloated” city far removed from the “joy of reconstruction.” His foil, Doctor Ōnishi (Mizuho Suzuki, Simon Prescott), fosters the belief Tetsuo and the other psychic children his laboratory dissects may be the “next stage of human evolution.” Neither are able to come to an effective consensus. Tetsuo assumes the design of both their greatest aspiration and deepest fears of advancement, breaching their containment with merciless rage.
Elusive to the silver screen, don’t miss the rare opportunity to witness Akira courtesy of the Tower Theater at 7:00 p.m. on May 16, 2018.
The joys of Tetsuo’s past life are lost as his wrath descends upon Neo-Tokyo. Disoriented by whispers of Akira, a psychic child existing only in the ether, the mad god prescribes only to his most fatalistic inclinations. Purging the remnants of his inadequacies, Tetsuo visits a drug-dealing bar his companions frequented. Indulging in the narcotics he was formerly denied, Tetsuo is quickly disappointed by the novelties of old. When two of his former colleagues stumble into the bar, the interior has been decimated with Tetsuo sitting upon a throne of tiresome delights. Tetsuo admits to the boys even the most lauded prize, Kaneda’s bike is reduced to “a pile of shit” in the wake of his ascension. Tetsuo kills one member of the couple, executing the commitment to his role of depravity incarnate.
Lost in the blight besieging them, much of Neo-Tokyo’s populace opts to instead worship their genocidal harbinger. With a cruel symbiosis, Otomo illustrates humanity’s final defense mechanism through the cult of Akira. Baffled by the events that have transpired, the logical resolve for the city’s inhabitants is to consider such a scenario cosmic. Tetsuo’s greatest power, it seems, is to override belief.
The unfiltered power of Akira ultimately forgoes Tetsuo himself. Unable to sustain the notion of annihilation, Tetsuo’s vessel is rendered useless as he undergoes a telling transformation. A monstrous allegory of the colonel’s earlier consideration, Tetsuo bursts into a hellish mass of flesh, gore, and metal. As if Neo-Tokyo has twisted into its own citizenship, Tetsuo can only scream in anguish as his physical form is perverted beyond recognition. Regrets pierce the boy’s wails, but the machinations of progress appear irreversible.
Gradually forming into a giant, ghastly baby, Otomo’s conjures an allegory for Neo-Tokyo. Unable to move past infancy following the mulligan brought by cataclysm, only the city’s underdeveloped and guttural tendencies can thrive. The reign of Tetsuo was only an explosive parallel to the plight the city has endured for decades. Ōnishi, for example, finds the kaiju to emulate the “birth of the universe” moments before he is obliterated within the confines of his machines. The three child psychics, and arguably the only sustainable counterparts to Akira, determine Neo-Tokyo’s trajectory can only be rectified with their own sacrifice; they hurl themselves into the white light fueled by the former Tetsuo and thus mitigating another mass explosion. As light pierces the clouds a la the conclusion of Rashomon, Neo-Tokyo is given a second chance to move forward.
Timeless in its prophetic warning of progress without reconciliation, Otomo’s Akira is a visceral image of one of civilization’s most painful inclinations. His work is critical of and optimistic towards humanity’s ability to destroy and mend, containing these tendencies within a beautiful piece of animated cinema. Despite the harshness of Akira’s warnings, Otomo contends we are children capable of contemplation and thus, positive advancement.
