Okay, so now that the response is overwhelming, I have to ask:
@rubyquartz, is this pretty much the response you were expecting? Have you already seen/read Akira? Was there something that made you think it was controversial, or were you just wondering if SB had its own special elitist opinion on it? Is there a part 2?
I am a fan of SB dishing about stuff it likes/hates. I am basically a character from High Fidelity, and I’m sorry to say that you are all my Jack Blacks.
Wait a second.
…
…
Oh god.
I am the Jack Black.
Oh Jesus.
I need to lie down.
altough i prefer the manga, akira as a whole is one of my favorites things ever. such a parade of good taste and sharp sensibilities and weird/cool stuff. sometimes it’s hard to keep track on the chain of events since everyone is running for their lives most of the time, so last week i started re-reading it. i’m already on volume 6!
on what i remember from the complementary nature of the film i particularly like the different outifits the characters are wearing and how they implemented kaori as tetsuo’s buddy from the beginning (it’s literally canon-fanfic but in a cute way).
also, err, this
(eventually i’ll get the film in the highest image-quality possible and make the definitive gif-version of this scene; all the ones i find around are just not good enough).
I saw it for the first time about 4 years ago you can look up my opinion then on SB1. Now I think it is a pretty great movie.
I read book 1 in the original Japanese. I would love to find for not a million dollars the printing that is in full color. The art in both medium is the fucking best.
And from everything I have heard of modern YA fiction violence it fits right in.
Also would totally go to a Live Action Movie because no future animemanga2Hollywood is going to be as bad as Dragon Ball.
There are a lot of Akira shirts on amazon. Some of them even approach wearable.
Kaneda posing on his awesomebike was my desktop wallpaper for a long, long time.
Guys, every time we talk about Akira, I’m reminded of that mass-published dissertation on anime written by Susan Napier. Man, now that I actually know how to write continental philosophy papers I should probably reread it (originally read it in junior high).
My main memories of it were a lot of pointing out that giant robots are a male power fantasy and the use of the word “elegy,” which was new to me at the time.
I remember her reading of Akira being pretty much spot-on, though uninspiring. Y’know: Akira is kind of thematically straightforward, so she just laid it out. Her intention really wasn’t to gush over the quality of something so much as to discuss its thematic content as an overview of what this “new” artform was putting into the world.
She noted how legitimately funny Ranma is, so clearly she has taste.
oh yeah I’ve seen Akira…the animation is as people have said so fucken good that it hurts. its got the vitality of a western rotoscoped sort of thing without the creepy details of actually being rotoscoped. The sense of place is done so well, especially in the first parts when (to a 1st time viewer) it seems like its going to be a motorcycle gang movie. In those early segments the film has a very effective way of focusing viewer attention on the horror aspects, such as Tetsuo hallucinating his guts falling out and also him seeing the cartoon characters in hospital, they contrast very effectively with the mundane and gritty reality that the movie has set out before.
I guess I was interested if there was as much ambivalence about Akira as there seems to be about Eva around here. (Like Eva, Akira has a sort of ‘fakeout’ strucutre, where it presents itself as a rollicking hypeviolent romp through Neo-Tokyo on motorbike (/sleekly designed mecha), promising pulp style adventures given new legitimacy for the late 20th-early 21st century before reeling the viewer into various near-nihilist spectacles of power/control/patriarchy gone awry.) And I guess there’s not, so thats my curiosity sated.
For myself, I find that the ‘cool’ parts and the ‘challenging’ parts don’t gel well together in my memory or my perception of Akira as a single whole. It seems like a bunch of different works set in the same universe. I have read some of the manga, and that Otomo managed to shave that thing down into a watchable anime shows an admirable craftman’s skill as a storyteller.
always thought the movie ruled as a kid, just went through the whole manga for the first time last year, and of course that fuckin’ ruled too
I rewatched FLCL on bluray and had a good time.
Akira was the first manga I’ve ever read, back in 91-96. Basically these years my traditional xmas present was one Akira color edition.
The graphic design blew me away at the time… The storyboard quality, with a strong, vivid sense of motion. The punk attitude of the youth, the disenchantment and the magic. The wide cast of characters of all ages and sizes. I would redraw the best pages just for fun. A bunch of friends and I really got into it in a big way, in a lasting way.
Me and my friends watched the movie in VHS for some reason, can’t be sure whether if we saw it at all in the theaters back then. Anyhow, I think we came out a bit underwhelmed. But for sure we loved the soundtrack, and I still have the CD somewhere in pristine condition.
This year, someone made a pretty cool techno album out of takes from the soundtrack:
One of my highschool friends who was big into Akira sent me that link after I just spent an evening on the Tokyo highways in a weird roundabout trip to Narita. I remember how crazy and video game like the highways felt.
So in summary, Akira is a big part of my life somehow
I packed my final college semester with a bunch of “fun” classes, including history courses on modern Japan and nuclear weapons, and a sci-fi films class. I ended up writing a killer paper on Godzilla, and a final exam essay about the importance of age and the Olympic stadium in Akira for the latter class. Wish I got that exam back.
My final paper for the nuclear weapons class was about SDI, so I probably had something insightful to say about that satellite laser too.
The manga is like the movie: extended edition. Absolutely amazing read. I got the entire full-color collection and if I remember correctly (can’t check, they are at my parent’s home) the printing is flipped. Or maybe it was just the spine illustration. It is printed in… 5? volumes and the spines show Tetsuo’s robo-arm when lined up, but they line up in reverse…
The dude from the comics shop where I bought it seemed to indicate with some elitism that he thought the B&W edition was superior. Not sure why. The coloring in the manga follows pretty much Otomo’s direction and looks like the coloring in the anime.
Anyway, the movie is, even 28 years later, still unsurpassed as one of the most important works of animation in history. Absolutely a must-watch.
There was a “controversial” re-dub that was met with bad reactionsmerely because it’s not the one people who grew up watching Akira were familiar with. It’s natural. I happend to watch it for the first time with the new dub, so I wasn’t affected by the nostalgia factor.
I’m not bothered by the writing in GiTS, and it has some really great scenes, but it’s pretty distant from Akira.
If I recall correctly, the movie was finished like 2 years before the manga was, so a lot of late-plot stuff didn’t even exist on printed form when it premiered.
But indeed it recontextualizes characters and plot points to fit an Akira story into movie format. It does it pretty well. As usual, “the book is better” because it has more room to breathe and develop, and a lot more content.
Akira is one of the coolest cartoon animes out there
This thread intrigues me because I really thought everyone unabashedly loved it and now i kind of wish some one was willing to do a really in depth takedown to prove us all wrong
This is baffling. Like I said upthread, it was justifiable to think that Akira was a bunch of pretty images and an incoherent plot if all you had to go on was the older dub. The re-dub is an unambiguous improvement in every way.
Perhaps I should clarify that I’m referring to the spanish dubs, of which there are also two. I’ve never watched it dubbed to english (nor the original spanish dub for that matter) so I’m not aware of any mistranslations or incoherences present in those first versions.
The newer spanish dub had newer, different actors doing the voices, I think Kaneda was voiced by the same guy who voiced Kenshin in spanish. It sounded different and therefore “bad” to people who watched the film before that.
It’s a pretty common reaction. There are 6 official recognized languages spoken in Spain, and, besides Castillian Spanish, the 3 most spoken regional languages (Galician, Catalan, and Basque) usually get dubs for cartoons and other programs deemed for kids as well. When you grow up watching a cartoon in your regional language and later on are exposed to another regional dub, it immediately sounds “off”. Something similar happens when they re-dub an estabilished movie, even in the same language.