Review of Akira
When comes to cyberpunk, I always have dificult in analyse things up, because they're too much mixed and non-linear. Not that I don't like non-linearity, but sometimes people make of it an artifice of narrative to make things sound like "complex", even not being. That's is the case of Akira. The story was a little odd in the very beggening, but after a few scenes it becomes completely awkward to me. I don't like when the plot elements are thrown in my face, but the contrary is not good at all. You can't situate yourself in Akira environment (at least in anime) because it lacks thedevelopment factor.. The characters are just too strange. I can know what they doing sometimes, but I never know what they are and why they're doing that stuffs. Seriously, it comes a point where you just can't link the points, even trying so hard. And by the end you comes to know that there's no points. Just arbitrary cyberpunk violent events shooted towards you in 24fps.
The animation was gorgeous. Seriously, even by today's standards, that was a great masterpiece. It can be hard for newcomers in anime even process those high-frame scenes and detailed scenarios. The sound was rare focused, but when it appeared it was pretty interesting. Based mostly in percussion, you can see the Originality factor that lacks in almost every anime I've watched.
Last but not least, the characters. Oh boy, here we comes to decepction again. I don't know about the manga (I plan to read soon), but in this movie, the characters are just mediocre. I'm surely not the first one to say that only Tetsuo has some development, because it's the pure truth. Sounds like they're are used only as an attempt of dramatize the empty story that we see on the movie. Instead of telling their motivations, showing some meaningful dialogues like those that are in Ghost in the Shell, etc, we just endup by watch a bunch of thrown characters being utilized for senseless violence exposition and confusing more and more our minds and expectations for the show.
Anyway, it's like a lot of anime I've seen until now. A undeniable well-designed anime, but with a weak story-telling and almost empty characters. I wound't recommend to anyone, except for someone who doesn't want to understand anything and see a lot of violence exposure.