Review of Akira

I rewatched Akira with a 4K Blu-Ray that had finally arrived. The impact that this film had on filmmaking is incredible, it was a major piece of work that has lead to the direct popularity of one of my favourite medians (anime) in the west, during a time when Hollywood executives saw this film and thought it would fail in west, because nobody wants to watch a cartoon with mature and adult themes and ideas, fortunately for us they were very wrong, as now we have anime movies that outgross a lot of the big Hollywood movies this year. Now getting onto what Iactually think of this gem, starting off what you would notice just looking at any frame of this movie is the visuals and animation. The work in the backgrounds are incredibly done, there is so much effort and detail put into the backgrounds, when you think about the fact that this movie was handmade with pencil and paper, it’ll blow your mind the effort they put into these incredible looking backgrounds, just every single detail put to screen looks like something that could be put in a museum.

The story and concepts this film puts into you are incredible and though provoking, when you watch this film, I’ve seen a lot of people who have never watched Akira and just thought it was a biker film and then they watch it, and their minds are blown away by what is being presented to them. The majority of the characters with some exceptions (Tetsuo and Kaneda) are admittedly forgettable and not that well baked, but the ideas put into this are so amazing you forget about how many of the characters don’t have much to them and just focus on what’s happening on the more ideas driven story about some sort of military project. Admittedly this movie can also be confusing to watch, but the more you rewatch it, like many other classic anime movies, like Ghost In the Shell or Perfect Blue, (although I fell in love with perfect blue the first watch) the more you understand it and why it is so amazing, I digress.

To conclude, it really hurts me doing this but I just cannot give it a 10 rating, due to some underdeveloped characters and messy writing, I have to give it a 9/10, I really wish I could give it a 10/10, because I love this movie to death, but that is the way it is unfortunately.