Akira (1988)
Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo
A secret military project endangers Neo-Tokyo when it turns a biker gang member into a rampaging psychic psychopath that only two teenagers and a group of psychics can stop.
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5 films that influenced Akira
What critics say influenced Akira
The ads hype "Akira" as a cross between "Heavy Metal," the animated sci-fi anthology, and Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner."
The rebuilt city, looking like an animated "Blade Runner" prototype, is under military rule, though barely: Packs of motorcycle-riding cyberpunks race through the streets engaging in deadly jousts.
But as a purely visual experience, this science-fiction epic is a furious spectacle of lush colors and dynamic movement that deftly combines elements of Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
With action that was bloody and frenetic (but unlike so much anime, not incomprehensibly so), Akira was a worldwide hit and one of the few post-Blade Runner science-fiction movies to have a truly distinctive design aesthetic.
Set in the metropolis of Neo-Tokyo 30 years after an atomic bomb has been dropped on Tokyo Bay, this superviolent epic borrows liberally (if unimaginatively) from Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, Japanese disaster movies, Brian De Palma's telekinesis movies, and SF writer Alfred Bester to create the equivalent of the dullest of all possible computer games.
It would be a lie to say that nobody had seen anything like this before - it's one of the countless films to borrow huge chunks of its design mentality from Blade Runner - but it has the goodness to be a thoroughly successful version of itself.
Le cinéaste japonais ne se contente pas ici de simplement reprendre quelques idées du passé rappelant les univers de films comme Blade Runner ou encore le Metropolis de Fritz Lang (dans un contexte mené sur un front toutefois beaucoup plus réaliste qu’expressionniste) et finit par en compléter la majorité par ses propres élans philosophiques.
It’s Godzilla meets Rebel Without a Cause .
After that there are a lot of other movies that come to mind while watching "Akira," from "Star Wars" to "Superman," but chiefly Brian DePalma's "The Fury" and David Cronenberg's "Scanners" right down to the one-on-one duel-of-the-telekinetics.
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This is, in its essentials, and using exclusively American cinematic touchstones, a '50s juvenile delinquency movie crossed with a '70s paranoia thriller that very suddenly transitions into a gory remake of the last act of 2001: A Space Odyssey for its final half-hour.