Tokyo was destroyed in 1988 by what looked like a bomb. Thirty-one years later Neo-Tokyo is a city of gangs, protests and a government that does not know what it has in a cryogenic vault under the Olympic stadium. Kaneda’s biker gang fights the Clowns on the highway. Tetsuo, the youngest, crashes into a child with an old man’s face. The army takes him. Akira cost more than any animated film made in Japan before it, and it is the reason anime exists in the West.
What Happens To Tetsuo
Experiments wake something in him. He breaks out, kills the doctors, takes Kaneda’s bike and his girlfriend, and goes looking for Akira, the child whose power destroyed Tokyo. The three Espers, the grey children, try to stop him. The colonel tries to shoot him with a satellite. The last act is at the Olympic stadium with Tetsuo’s arm becoming something else, his body expanding into flesh the size of a building, and Kaneda in the middle of it with a laser rifle.
Why It Looks The Way It Does
Otomo adapted his own 2,000-page manga and drew 160,000 cels with the dialogue recorded first, so the lips match. The bike slide, with the light trails, has been copied in every medium. The score by Geinoh Yamashirogumi is gamelan and Noh chants. The Olympic stadium under construction for 2020, which the film predicted, became a joke when the real Tokyo Olympics were delayed.
Watch Akira On GoMovies
124 minutes in HD, Japanese with subtitles. Press play above. Free, no account.
