Akira - The Criterion Collection [Dub] (LD)

In the Neo-Tokyo of 2019 AD, an angry young motorcycle gangster encounters a mysterious supernatural force that slowly transforms him into a one-man apocalypse. Katsuhiro Otomo's feature-length Akira is not only the best Japanese animation ever exported to the West—it is, by any medium's measure, a bewitching cautionary tale built of astonishing images.

There's been a lot of loose talk over the years about "the art of animation." Here, for once is an actual specimen—a work of art that happens to be animated. Katushiro Otomo's Akira doesn't just ape the technique of "real movies" without embarrassing itself. The suspense, horror, awe and exhalation that he invokes are potent by any measure. And while Otomo does incorporate brief snippets of computer animation in Akira, he doesn't need a computer to create a hand-drawn image that we can move through, and around in, and gape at from every possible angle.
 Akira is not merely a technical tour de force. The vast machinery of cells and xerography and ink-'n'-paint has been harnessed to a unified expressive purpose. A mesmerizing blend of high government conspiracies, teenage angst, revolution, evolution, and motorcycle gang mayhem, topped off by a 21st-century telekinetic detonation, Akira would be classic science fiction and thrilling cinema, even if it weren't animated. Of course, if it weren't animated, it probably couldn't exist at all—not at today's prices.
 Otomo creates a demonic future. Neo-Tokyo was flattened in 1996 when a top secret weapons experiment backfired. The mad doctors and crazed warriors of the first Akira Project has wanted to crack open the human mind and explosively release its untapped energy. It makes perfect sense (as it did in the Brian De Palma PSI-thrillers Carrie and The Fury) that the ideal candidates for these brain-fusion experiments would be adolescents, because their nervous systems are already turbocharged, They go through Jekyll-and-Hyde seizures when their powers begin to erupt, like the standard hormonal crises writ large. The fireball that engulfs Tokyo comes right out of the forehead of a twisted street kid. Now a gifted youngster, a put-upon gangbanger with a raging grudge against the world, has become the guinea pig of Akira Phase Two. All hell is about to break loose again—Apocalypse 2.
 It's no wonder Otomo insisted on shooting Akira in 70mm: Neo-Tokyo, circa 2019 A.D. has been visualized down to the last brushstroke of graffiti, and every detail is worth seeing. The production supplement of the Criterion Collection edition shows off the fine-point precision of Otomo's sketches and storyboard illustrations. A tavern that figures in only two scenes is envisioned from its floor-plan to the CDs in its jukebox—even to the inner workings of the box. The swiveling complexity of an incidental item like the gyroscopic body-scanner in a secret laboratory, with its interlocking cylindrical moving parts, goes further. The machine doesn't need to look that spiffy, and it doesn't need to be half that complicated. It's been designed to the hilt just for the pleasure of it, as a high-tech object d'art.
 As is not uncommon in high-genre exercises, the characters who inhabit this spangled and trashy new world, from the noble bikers Kaneda and Tetsuo to the heavy-breathing crypto-fascist Colonel, are two-dimensional figures—in more ways than one. But then, the characters seem to be extensions or agents of the psyche of the city, which has an overriding destiny fo its own. The translation of Akira from comic book to movie, Otomo says, allowed him to display Neo-Tokyo all at once, as a single huge entity.
 Otomo was still almost an apprentice animator when he made this seductively accomplished picture. In his early 30s he was one of Japan's most popular creators of manga—fat comic books, slapped onto thick newsprint pages in dynamic diagonals, designed to be read at blistering speeds. (Manga are not a fringe cult, but a major commercial force: Top titles can unload six million copies a week, spinning off animated and live-action TV shows and features, as well as lucrative toy-driven merchandise.) Otomo was the acclaimed writer and artist of multi-volume sagas like Fire Ball, Domu and the original magazine version of Akira, reprinted in the Staes by Marvel's Epic Comics division. Otomo has made two live-action movies (Give Me a Gun, Give Me Freedom in 1988, and World Apartment Horror in 1991), but his only work in animation prior to Akira had been a few short films. Right out of the gate he has redeemed one of the central promises of animation: its power to conjure up new worlds.
 If movement is the essence of animation, the essence of Otomo's animation is movement not so much of figures, but of the camera through space-swooping around high-rise monuments bristling with embellishments. It is movement—specifically, its degree of naturalism—that is often a sore point among American cartoon fanciers. Some, steeped in the Disney/Warners establishment tradition, make a fetish of "complete animation" and reflexively slag off the so-called "limited animation" of Japan. But apart from its agile camera moves, the crowning glories of Japanese animation have always been the boldness of its concepts and the visceral grandiosity of its designs. The animation in Akira is fuller than usual for Japan (Otomo, too, is a Disney fan), but what matters most is that his feast of visual ingenuity has real heat and passion behind it. The hallucinations that terrorize poor Tetsuo late one night, as his transformation is kicking in, look and feel authentic, like nightmares we could really suffer through. A taste of reality like that, a flash of earned empathy, is more promising step for animation than all the technical artifice in Toontown.
  -David Chute

SPECIAL FEATURES
Entire first issue of the Akira graphic novel and excerpts from subsequent issues
English and Japanese trailers
The most extensive treatment of an animated feature ever on home video, including original storyboards drawn by director Katsuhiro Otomo, thousands of production drawings and animation cells, behind-the-scenes footage, original animation pencil tests, and much more.