When talking about anime, it's necessary that you bring up Akira. It's one of the landmarks of the medium and stands as one of the great all time films, not just in anime, but overall.
The film paints a dark picture of a dystopian society. It's very grim and gritty. There are riots, gang wars, and the police use assault weapons to mow people down with impunity. It's violent and shocking, but not so much that you are turned off by it. There's gore, but it never gets too sadistic, or becomes violent for its own sake.
The story's a pretty dense one and thus doesn't exactly lend itself to summary, but it mostly follows two characters Kaneda, the leader of a biker gang and Tetsuo, a younger kid who Kaneda is over protective of. Tetsuo is determined to prove his own worth and resents Kaneda for always interfering. This is odd, Kaneda was always quick to show genuine concern over Tetsuo's well being and Tetsuo acts as if it's some egregious attack.
During a fight with a rival gang, Tetsuo crashes his bike into a psychic who had escaped from the military. They take him in and perform experiments on him. Why? Not sure exactly, but they do it anyway. Somehow an energy that lies dormant in every one is awakened and Tetsuo's mind snaps like a twig. He develops something of a God complex and wreaks havoc across New Tokyo.
A lot of people say that the movie is too weird. Maybe it's just that as a regular anime watcher, I learned to sort of compensate for the more surreal aspects of some anime, but this one wasn't all that hard for me to understand. It's metaphysical, sure, and there's no denying it's complex, but at the end I still had a pretty good idea of what had been going on throughout the movie.
The animation is gorgeous, from the atmosphere of the town to the chaos that ensues in the latter half of the movie, it's all skillfully done and you almost can't take your eyes off it.
One of the more memorable scenes involve a bunch of toys in Tetsuo's hospital room coming to life and terrorizing him. If you want an example of what is known as "nightmare fuel" that scene offers a perfect example.
Akira is a landmark film that not only set the standard for future releases, but also helped popularize it outside of Japan. While your mileage may certainly vary (as said before, it is a surreal and heady film) it acts as a pretty good litmus test for those who are curious to see if anime is for them.
There are weaknesses, of course. The joke that half the script is just Kaneda and Tetsuo screaming out each other's names isn't completely inaccurate and it does try to cram in an immense manga into a short relatively short run-time. Even so, it's a movie that's well worth watching, even just once.
There was talk of a live action adaptation, but thankfully, it seems to be stuck in development hell. As advanced as technology has gotten, I don't even think CGI could pull off what this film did.
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