The Impact of Akira: The Film that Changed Everything

there was everything else and then there was a Kyra [Music] akira is the most important moment in the history of modern anime no other piece of media has even come close to the seismic effect this film has had on anime as a global industry and it did it in an age when anime was a virtual unknown in the West when even visionary filmmakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg looked at films like Akira and couldn't imagine a world where they could succeed in the West and yet Akira blew through every cultural barrier and global limitation and woke the Western world to the fact that Japanese animation existed for every time you've sat down and watched an episode of Dragon Ball Z for every fan Theory you've seen on Evangelion for every YouTube video you've watched about anime Akira is the point when that started to happen it's also a film that I feel has fallen out of popular consciousness in recent times it's rare discussed now outside the most hardcore circles or in relation to the hellish never ending pre-production of its live-action adaptation and so I wonder how much the youngest generation of anime fans actually knows or even cares about this movie after all I curate doesn't look like a modern anime it doesn't move like modern anime hell it doesn't feel like modern anime nothing about akira is even remotely reminiscent of what anime has become and that's a big part of what makes it special as Akira was the culmination of one of the most exciting times in animes history the mid to late 80s an era that many have dubbed the golden age of anime this title is more than just a rose hue tinting of the past however there were very specific factors that made anime of this era special Japan of the 1980s was for the first time since world war ii is starting to see a major economic upturn this brought the tokyo stock market index to an all-time high and surged japan's economy to heights it had never seen which meant that a comfortable middle class lifestyle was now available to anyone willing to on a shirt and tie and embrace the life of a salaryman this excess and disposable income meant that there is now a massive influx of money to both consume and create film and animation with anime feature films in particular seeing an unprecedent growth in the 1970s 49 animated feature films were produced in Japan but in the 1980s that number more than quadrupled to 220 the Golden Age of anime was more than just a fiscal boom however at this point anime had been a commodified industry in Japan for more than two decades which meant that by the mid 80s there were professional animators in Japan who had been honing their skills for nearly 30 years while the generation that had grown up with the works of these masters were just entering the animation industry for the first time and together the two groups were beginning to realize the potential these skills could have leash just as critically though the anime industry was still relatively new this was a time before anime had really become anime before otaku culture had really galvanized and fans started looking to anime for Hyper specific things and before studios started to pander to them and so what you had was a flourishing industry awash with cash filled with skilled and passionate animators who were for the first time realizing the full potential of animation and who weren't trying to adhere to an abstract concept of what anime should be and the results were projects that were aimed at no one and therefore could be appreciated by everyone beautiful expressions of mood and tone like angel's egg thoughtful and harrowing depictions of the chaos brought about by war like grave of the fireflies joyous flights of imagination like my neighbor totoro or insanely polished ova s like Gunbuster anime for this period is often seen as hyper violent and grotesquely sexualized and while it certainly is in a lot of cases to me this adult content was also a sign that Japan's animators were realizing that animation didn't need to add ear to any one audience that it could depict literally anything and this was them slamming up against the bound of those preconceptions and so the 80s became awash with anime that was experimental and adult and gorgeous and the precipice of this came in 1988 in the form of Akira Akira was a giant collaboration between seven different entertainment conglomerates which swelled Akira's budget to approximately 8 to 11 billion yen ten times that of Studio Ghibli is Nausicaa and you could see it directly in the frame count Akira was animated with a combination of ones and twos meaning that the majority of the film was brought to life with either 12 drawings a second or even in places 24 drawings per seconds far surpassing the Studio Ghibli benchmark and allowing the animation to flow like liquid in a way that led Akira go toe-to-toe with Disney's top-tier productions Akira moves beautifully with the action scenes hitting hard and the emotional scenes feeling well emotional but it's also more than just that there's a level of detail and nuance in the animation of Akira that I have yet to really see surpassed shots where even the tiniest detail feels taken into consideration and the results are mesmerizing just check out this shot that comes later on in the film where tetra regenerates his arm out of old pieces of scrap metal and just look at how each tiny wire and screw twists and locks to place to form the actual muscles and tendons or even just in very minor shots where even background details are animated like here where there's a ever so slight pull in on Tetsu and they've actually animated the perspective on the ground to move in accordance with the camera and this level of detail is present in so many shots throughout the movie where there's all these different things happening on screen at once and it's nearly impossible to take it all in and it makes Akira's world feel chaotic and and never more so in the wide scale scenes of mass destruction that that punctuate the Kyra's story these scenes in particular stand out not only because of how beautifully they're animated but because destruction is a major underlying theme of Kyra and a huge part of what made the film feel so distinctive West American sci-fi of the 80s and 90s has this reverence for Technology often being treated as a way to help prevent some great disaster catastrophe but there is a distinct difference in Japanese pop culture while there was certainly the same fetishization of Technology there was often a deep-rooted underlying cynicism to it with many stories not being about the prevention of large-scale disaster but learning to survive once disaster has occurred this difference in perspective is seen by many as a reverberation of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War two in which two atomic bombs were detonated over the city of Hiroshima killing a hundred and twenty-nine thousand people this tragedy was reflected in many pieces of iconic Japanese cinema that followed throughout the years and we can see this directly in the first shot of Akira as a catastrophic explosion of lice eradicate say Tokyo cityscape and we leap forward for decades to the year 2019 and from the ashes of a ruined Tokyo has risen Neo Tokyo a dangerous wild dystopia of a city where biker gangs openly spill each other's blood in the streets and where civil unrest and mass protests have led to frequent rioting with the scars of mass destruction that can still be felt in every aspect of society it's a semblance of Tokyo that feels like it's spinning violently apart still stumbling and sputtering in the wake of World War three and we see it all through the eyes of Canada and Tetsuo two orphaned delinquents who together have formed a violent motorcycle gang and have eked out a chaotic existence in these streets of Neo Tokyo and you can see the struggle the city faces in every facet of their lives from the overcrowded schools to the way they're treated by adults to the random acts of violence they commit against regular citizens the film does an exceptional job of establishing the worlds these characters live in not through any real exposition but just through strong at dystopian imagery there's this one shot in the beginning of the Fist of the North Star movie where we see this boat harpooned through a skyscraper and I love this shot I don't think I've ever seen an image that's so immediately and clearly conveys that this world is just well and it's strong a world building imagery like this that's present throughout akira from the ruined monument outside Canada and Tetsuo school to the searing neon lights that bathed the city in a harsh futuristic glow and it really conveys the feeling that these characters are trapped both by the city and by the shadow of the catastrophe but while Canada's wild nature allows him to thrive in the chaos Tetsuo feels bitter and alone his only confident life being his girlfriend carry the two together dreaming of escaping Neo Tokyo and living a peaceful life somewhere else by fixing the events of the story from the perspectives of Canada and Tetsuo it lets us empathize with the long-reaching intimate human cost of large-scale disaster Canada and Hetzel are violent linked ones but they're a product of their environments without families or a stable society they never had a chance to be anything else a problem that only grows more complicated when after an encounter with an escaped government test subject Tetsuo begins to awaken his latent psychic ability letting him manifest his inadequacy and rage into massive telekinetic blasts and from here he turns against his former friends and the city itself hoping to find the one named Acura the psychic weapon responsible for Tokyo's destruction in the first place the story is tied together by a soundtrack consisting of traditional Japanese instrumentals layered with eighties future synth and what's cool is these two styles together create this kind of traditional / sci-fi vibe which speaks directly to the themes of a cure combining Japan's past and its future all these different elements come together to create one of the most stunning a movie experiences in history and personally one of my all-time favorites but here's the thing over the years I've gone back and rewatched Akira more times than I can count and over the course of those rewatch is I've come to realize something and that is that the film Akira is a compromise and allow me to explain Akira was based off the 1982 2000 page six volume epic manga of the same title written by the same man who directed the film ket's a hero Ultimo and specifically what the film is is the first half of the first volume and the last half of the last volume with a kind of amalgamated middle third that struggles to link these two divergent pieces of storytelling together and the result is a second act that feels heavily truncated and hard to follow with conversations that try to touch off some major themes that are never really given the proper room to land watch Akira with someone who's never seen it before and they'll likely struggle to follow all the divergent plot threads the film begins to layer on around the 40-minute mark as it covers everything from drug addiction to a government coup to the evolution of humanity and even the nature of existence before finally coming together in a messy but satisfying conclusion the reason I used the word compromise is that after watching a qur'an of times it's easy to start feeling like you're getting a truncated version of a much larger story but that larger story does exists and it exists in the form of the manga the relationship between the film and manga is a strange one not only because they share an author and director but because it's difficult to even say that the film is a full adaptation of the manga as the manga was created before during and after the release of the movie only concluding in June of 1990 two years after the release of the film that in a way both the film and the manga are the original versions of Akira with the Tomo himself stating that the experience of directing the movie massively shaped the direction the manga would end up going in and so the manga is at once the inspiration for the film as well as the revised version of it and the result is a much fuller more complete story with concepts that are only touched upon in the movie being given room to breathe and grow and shape the narrative of the manga throwaway characters with less than 30 second screen time in the film take on massive story critical roles in the comic and the conflicts around in Canada and Tetsuo grows to encompass a much larger cast in a story that doesn't really feel like it's about any one character but dozens of smaller individuals each one of which has their own strengths weaknesses and motivations that play a part in shaping a much grander narrative while the film takes advantage of light sound movement in color the manga takes advantage of its own medium in some really profound and beautiful ways Ultimo has an incredibly solid grasp on all aspects of manga from his expressive characters to his flow of action through paneling to his incredibly detailed background Aras possibly my favorite thing about the way automa makes manga though is how he creates a sense of empathy with his characters through these beautifully quiet single page spreads where nothing really happens and it's just the characters alone in their environments and in a story where major plot events are defined by gigantic world ending Cataclysm these pages create these beautifully intimate little moments where were just allowed sit with these characters and just feel what they feel and it really helps ground Akira's world and puts across the feeling that even throughout all the war and chaos this is just a story of a people trying to survive a situation that is much greater than they are there is an instance of this that occurs about halfway through the manga it happens at the climax of the mangas second major story arc when Akira suffers a major emotional trauma and he Alisha's this massive double-page city crushing psychic blast that tears through Neo Tokyo eradicating the entire city and what makes this sequence so special isn't even the blast itself it's what follows as we turn the pages were met with these beautifully detailed giant double page illustrations of Neo Tokyo just coming apart under the waste of Akira's attack and then again and again and again and with each turn of the page the magnitude of the event becomes more real and profound until finally there's just stillness we're just left to sit in the quiet devastation of the aftermath and the panel's slowly start to pull in on different characters from the story as they look out over the debris of the Cataclysm that moments ago was their home and there's this unbelievably sad feeling that these people's entire lives have changed making for maybe the most heroine depiction of mass destruction I've ever experienced in media it's parallels to Japan's own history being plain to see a moment like this works so well in the manga because does the space to convey a much larger more populated universe and so we feel it so much more when that universe is destroyed in a way that just isn't possible in a two-hour movie but none of that is to say that the manga invalidates the film I think if anything the mind get helped me understand why the film has such a powerful effect on people throughout Akira Neo Tokyo is destroyed over and over and over again and it's hard not to feel like there's a real grim message in there like that destruction is inevitable and people or what will cause it but I feel like there's something more there too because for every time one of these catastrophes does take place the characters that are left all pick themselves back off and eventually try to move forward and I think there's something really hopeful about that that even if the worst possible outcome occurs and it feels like there's nothing left life we'll always go on and we always have the option to move forward and that there will always be something to move forward to and what the film is is this message heavily condensed but beautifully realized and I think it's a message that people never stop needing to hear which alongside its incredible production gives Akira this kind of timeless quality that keeps it as relevant today as the first date introduced the world to a new kind of entertainments that day being December 25th 1989 when Akira saw a limited release in American cinemas just over a week after the first episode of The Simpsons aired on television anime in the West was a virtual unknown up until this points the handful of anime features that were released were subject to some pretty brutal Americanized edits like Studio Ghibli's Nazca which saw 25 minutes triplets runtime featuring characters on the poster who don't actually appear in the movie and so anime or any kind of animation aimed at adults just didn't really exist which is exactly what would have made a screening of Akira so mind-blowing think about all the themes we just discussed and compare them to titles like The Little Mermaid or a Land Before Time or an American tale and just imagine the massive cultural shock a screaming of Akira would have been how jarring Lee its depictions of violence and destruction and socio-political messaging would have stood alongside the child-focused offerings of Disney and Don Bluth and so Akira status as a cult classic exploded across the u.s. and the rest of the Western world's going on to make a staggering global box office of 45 million dollars which led to the 1991 VHS release of Akira from manga entertainments a distribution label established solely on the success of Akira in the West who would go on to co-produce the next major anime smash hit ghost in the shell' as well as being the first major distributor of anime in the West spreading Akira far and wide and creating the first sizable generation of Western anime fans and I include myself in that Akira was the first anime I ever saw I was around eight or nine years old and staying over at a relative's and my cousins had recorded a copy of Akira off some German sci-fi channel and I remember just sitting there and being transfixed by the film's anger and violence in transfer how it was like nothing I had ever seen before and what that might mean like somewhere out there there was this secret world of cartoons that was so different from anything I thought I knew and I can't help feel like that experience is shared by the West as a whole Akira was the moments that an entire society realized there was something really different and beautiful and insane out there and wondering what else might be it's hundreds of thousands of experiences like this that created the market in the West that future anime like Dragonball Z and Evangelion would later capitalize on and this is how a film so distinct to Japan and its history would transform the landscape of global animation forever this was the impacts of Akira the film that changed everything friends thank you once again for joining me today I sincerely hope you enjoyed today's video a little No I have a side channel now for smaller projects so if you'd like to see me talk wrestling for an hour and a half at mammoth muscles or watch a video of a trip I took to Japan it's overrun regular eye patch wolf link in the description down below as ever a massive shout out to my incredible supporters over on patreon who has ever make videos like this possible and if you would like to become one you can do so for no more than a single dollar over on patreon comm slash super eyepatch wolf this week in particular I'd like to thank Clem o Hazzard ham slammer Ishmael friend bot Lou Nathan Scroggins Alex hopper and haunted the vagabond as ever finally undead let's fight a boss video game podcast where this week we'll be discussing Dada related video games such as God of War and yak is a 6 or come find me on Twitter at I Pat wolf friends take care of yourselves and I'll see you next time

Channel: Super Eyepatch Wolf

Views: 3,697,955

Keywords: Akira, Anime, History of Anime, 80s anime, Hiroshima Bombing, The Golden Age of Anime, Manga, Katsuhior Otomo

Id: IqVoEpRIaKg

Length: 23min 4sec (1384 seconds)

Published: Sat May 05 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/McBassi]

This movie straight up predicted the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

I vote they create a one time only event: motorcycle race through the heart of Tokyo, ending in the Olympic stadium.

[u/Mange-Tout]

I saw the original run at a little art theatre in Dallas and was totally blown away by it. My experience with anime before that was old episodes of Star Blazers and Speed Racer. Akira’s plot line was a muddy, confusing mess but goddam was it ever pretty to look at.

[u/invincible789]

Love super eyepatch wolf.

[u/Porrick]

He only touched on the genius of the score for a second, and managed to get it wrong. He said it was traditional Japanese instrumentation, but gamelans are Balinese (edit: and also Javanese). The "traditional" instrumentation is a mix of (mostly) percussion from a wide range of cultures. Here's a gushing yet well-researched article on it.

Same as how Ghost In The Shell mixed Bulgarian harmonic singing with Japenese instruments and lyrics - but much more so. Akira is way up there with my favourite film scores of all time.

[u/[deleted]]

Tetsuooooo!

[u/rjdsf1993]

Gonna take this time to plug the shit out of Super Eyepatch Wolf. Dude puts so much care into his videos and makes you truly understand how important the subject of his videos are (at the very least to him). His JoJo's videos and his one on wrestling are two of my favorites.

[u/not-so-radical]

Hell yeah Eyepatch Wolf hitting the big subs.

[u/IronhideD]

I watched this during a theater run in Toronto. It was incredible. Anime on the big screen. Of course we had to watch everything that came to the theatres. The next movie that showed was an unknown (to us) movie called Legend of the Overfiend. It was anime, in the movie theater. So we HAD to see it. The regret was real. None of my friends could look at each other leaving the theater. One guy in the middle seats of the show yells out loud "This ain't right man! THIS AIN'T RIGHT!"

[u/ImAgunn]

Intro is Neo-Tokyo by Scandroid, great song!