Review of Akira

Often hailed as a classic, I can kind of see where the praises are coming from: this kind of hard hitting, apocolyptic anime always seem to attract acclaim. But personally, I couldn't really get into it that much. Or perhaps it's because I just didn't get it. My main problem with "Akira" is the vagueness of the story. I mean, I'm not the biggest fan of these abstract, philosophical stories to begin with, but "Akira" also suffers from a lack of completeness, which only exacerbated my confusion even more. I was watching it with a friend and he was having to constantly explain what tome what was happening using knowledge that he'd accumulated from reading the manga (and in fact he didn't fully understand everything either as he hasn't read all the manga). My own view on this is that an anime like this should be able to stand on its own - I shouldn't have to go digging into the manga just to understand what is going on.

The visuals of "Akira" was supposedly amazing at the time. But if it was, stylistically I don't think it's aged particularly gracefully, though it hasn't done too badly either. Some of the background scenery still looks great, but the characters designs have an odd, "wobbly" kind of feel to them.

Even though I didn't find the music particularly to my taste, I appreciate the fact that it tries to do something different. The chant heavy soundtrack used had a primitive and alien feel to it. In the context of the anime, it worked quite well in a weird way and didn't sound out of place. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the voices, which sounded rather horrific on the dub, with the sub sounding a little but not much better.

Other than Tetsuo's character, which was quite well done, I found the rest of the character to be a little wooden, which probably affected my enjoyment of this anime a bit. And as you probably will have guessed by now, I'm not too impressed regarding the grand, complicated plot underneath that's nigh on impossible to follow unless you've read the manga.

If you like those philosophical kind of anime, you'll probably enjoy "Akira". I can't deny that it's an interesting watch, but for me, that's about as far as it goes.

Personal rating: +0.5 (decent)