Akira [Thoughts]

As I have said on the 'about' page, one of the functions I intended for this blog to fulfil was to be a place for me to record my thoughts on new cyberpunk and postmodern SF works as I watched/read them. Unfortunately my first few attempts at posts mutated into long thematically concerned essays, and I sort of forgot that I could write a sub-2000 word post. In an effort to correct this, my next few posts will be short[er] form treatments of some of the books and films I have recently enjoyed, lest I forget what it is that piqued my interest in them. First up is Akira, still fresh in my mind after being watched last night. Note: the reader will have to forgive the knee-jerk reaction and relative lack of critical substantiation in these posts - the aim after all is for me to record my own honest and often ill-informed opinion. 

Akira. Probably a good ten years since I first heard of the behemoth of anime, the one that brought the east to the west and jump-started the whole craze that as a young teenager I eventually became a part of. Criminally, though, despite me (and every other teen) going through the obligatory ‘anime phase’ at school, I never got around to watching Akira. In a way I’m glad. I don’t think my teenage mind would’ve fully appreciated Akira. I don’t think my adult mind fully appreciates it, for that matter; one viewing barely scratches the surface of all that this anime has to offer. I can, however, say emphatically that it is very, very good. 

At face value it’s an extremely slick piece of work. I won’t bother with plot synopsis here, but suffice to say that even watched purely for entertainment value the collision of ice-cool Neo-Tokyo biker gangs and sinister government-operated psychics makes for an incredibly satisfying visual spectacle. From the blistering, kinetically charged bike-mounted battle between Capsules and Clowns to the film’s climactic final act in the ruins of the Olympic stadium, the animation, pacing and direction of the film is spot-on. 

When the action lets-up and the pace slows, there remains an almost unbearable tension; a relentless uneasiness. Every scene points towards something rotten at the heart of Neo-Tokyo. Events play out against a backdrop of civil unrest; of rioting and looting and police brutality, of people tired and desperately clinging on to their belief in the saviour Akira. Neo-Tokyo is not the utopia it promises, rather it is burned-out, its inhabitants fallen back into the old dyad of oppressor/oppressed: the rich have become bored of development and gentrification and the poor are left waiting. Imagery of decay is constant. Fights play out knee-deep in sewage and on the periphery of every scene can be spied a homeless couple here, a burning car there. The desperation comes to a head with the arrival of Tetsuo: the underclass latch onto him as an embodiment of the saviour they have been praying for and against the convention for bystanders in an apocalypse scene, the onlookers rush towards Tetsuo, only to be cut down by a police force given the full reign of martial law.   

The film is rich with symbolism and thematic content and invites endless interpretation. Events in the film are shadowed by boardroom meetings and money-stuffed suitcases, and authority figures from the military to the teachers are portrayed wholly as corrupt and abusive of power. Apocalypse book-ends the film, suggesting (in a similar way to The Second Renaissance) that the events of the film are cyclical: the consequence of repeating mistakes already made. In this sense the film is a socio-political warning; one particularly resonant to a late-80s Japan struggling to find its place in modernity as it comes to the height of its technological dominance but remains fractured by the events of WWII: a country striving to rebuild itself without blueprints. 

Development - and how to best handle development - is arguably the overriding theme of Akira. Whilst externally Neo-Tokyo develops and science rushes headlong into the unknown, Kaneda and the gang and particularly Tetsuo develop internally too. There is a strong psychological and sexual undercurrent to the film. Tetsuo’s journey takes the form of an exaggerated puberty: he experiences both mental and physical changes, changes that give him new power but also scare him. He accepts these changes eventually; harnessing them and becoming incredibly powerful, but without guidance he is ultimately consumed. His reversion back to the physical appearance of a baby is symbolically powerful; Akira, father/messiah, represents for the orphaned Tetsuo a new security, and Akira in return gives Tetsuo a new playground in which to explore his new self. 

I’ve referred twice now to Akira as the messiah, which isn’t a wholly correct or fair characterisation. Messianic he certainly is in the eyes of the cultists desperate for a saviour, likewise Akira must represent to Tetsuo’s tortured longing a messianic figure of redemption with the ability to somehow relieve him of his pain. He doesn’t appear to Tetsuo because (bare with me here) much like Lord Voldemort in the first Harry Potter book, Tetsuo is not an innocent and his desire is impure - something already noted by Kiyoko - and he is therefore deemed unworthy of the Philosopher’s Stone/Akira. To the Espers, however, Akira represents healing and friendship and their invocation to him is selfless, thus he appears from the inanimate specimens that the scientists likewise couldn’t correctly apprehend, and saves Neo-Tokyo. There is a lot to fathom in this conclusion and it would take me many viewings of Akira to separate out the tangled strands of symbolism and myth that converge into that great ball of light and the haunting final words: I am Tetsuo. 

OK, so that still wasn't very short. Yet still everything I have talked about here I have barely touched upon, and I haven’t touched at all on so much more. I could have talked about the film’s dualities, instances of Eastern theology, evolution and reincarnation, but above are the things that most prominently impressed themselves on me during and immediately after watching Akira. I always meant for this blog to be a way for me to skim all the thoughts off the top of my brain before they dissipated, and this half-coherent mess is the result. But it has done the job. I’ve got a whole heap of stuff to think about now before I revisit Akira for a second viewing; and I have a feeling that that second viewing won’t be far away.