Katsuhiro Otomo
Akira

A metropolis (Tokyo), a sun exploding in its center, no noise or background commentary... just silence, this is how "Akira" opens. Rapid flashes of light alternating with apocalyptic visions and twenty minutes of images alternating between brutality, daydreams, and silence, this is how "Akira" closes. In between is the story, an intriguing metaphor on the conceptual elusiveness of the opposition of good and evil, told as a hyper-technological nightmare where, if it exists, morality is entrusted to individual sensitivities, and to these is directed the invitation to grasp the unsettling aspects of a very open-ended finale.

124 minutes of Anime, the result of over five years of work, which saw a thousand animators engaged in 24-hour shifts under the direction of Katsuhiro Otomo, a brilliant Japanese cartoonist, creator in the early '80s of the cult Manga "Akira" from which this eponymous animated film is inspired. These are the essential figures of this animated epic. I deliberately used the term inspired and not taken, in fact given the complexity of the manga, Otomo decided not to conceive the film as a synthesis of the entire work but as the development of a single episode giving it a standalone structure that often diverges from the comic itself.

Thirty-one years after the end of the Third World Conflict, Japan is still in full reconstruction, and most of its inhabitants reside in New Tokyo, an alienating and confusing metropolis where political corruption reigns, supported more by interests than by conviction by the violent arm of an absolutist military order opposed by bands of rebels fighting for a more democratic society, while not disdaining terrorist acts, and gangs of young people left adrift engaging in acts of vandalism. Against this backdrop is the dramatic existentialist and fatalistic quest for a solution to bring order to a society doomed to self-extinction, this solution has a name: Akira. Akira, in fact, is the name of a psychic weapon designed by the military with the aim of bringing Japan back to its past glories, but Akira is also the name of a deity worshipped by the new post-war mysticism, who like a messiah should lead humanity toward peace. In this confusion live Kaneda and Tetsuo, two boys just over their teens, members of a gang of hooligans, who unwillingly and by chance will be involved in a spiral of violence and absurdity, balanced between science and nonsense, increasingly absurd until the cathartic knowledge of Akira.

I have deliberately made a "foggy" summary of this film because in my view it should be savored without knowing too much of the story (unless one has read the manga) to allow its alternating rhythm, between moments of absolute speed from Action Movie and others of almost exasperating slowness from psychological film, to enter the various sensitivities in an absolutely virgin and unexpected manner, so as to let pure subjectivity decide what to keep and what to leave. "Akira" is indeed, more than a film, a philosophical search aimed at experimenting with new ways of purification and where evil and good present themselves so masked and confused with each other that every character, even the most controversial one, contains within themselves the two essences and can never completely separate them (except one so grotesque aimed at representing not the evil in itself but only the utter squalor of a quest aimed solely at material goods).

A science fiction film finished in '87 (spartan, given the times, thus the support of computer graphics) inevitably has continuous references to cult movies of the genre (beautiful are the quotes from "Blade Runner" to "2001: A Space Odyssey") but they are always functional to the story and never thrown randomly and very, very personalized by the typical trait of an absolutely traditional drawing in the manga style thus creating an interesting contrast between tradition and avant-garde, the backgrounds in the urban life scenes are fascinating alongside a spine-chilling soundtrack written by Geinoh Yamashirogumi. It should be watched with an open mind and without seeking too many objective explanations, in short, let your subjectivity run free, you will see that it will be worth it.