1272: The Worst Headache in the World

I went to see Akira at the cinema this evening. I recall around the period anime first got fashionable in the UK that there was a considerable degree of snobbery about this movie, with people saying “oh, you have to see it on the big screen” and whatnot whenever it came on TV.

You know what, though? Having now seen it both on TV and on the big screen… yeah, the snobs were right. It’s spectacular.

The reason I was seeing Akira at all this evening was because my good friends George and Mitu, whose marriage we are attending later in the year, happened to be in the area and had booked tickets. George popped up on Steam earlier and asked me if I fancied coming out at short notice for a 10.30pm showing, and because I’m never really doing anything of note, I accepted. (If anyone else is in the area and wants to do something fun… try me. I’m usually available.) So thanks, George and Mitu, for getting me out of the house on a Saturday evening and seeing a film I don’t think I’ve seen for at least 15 years or so.

I first saw Akira when it came on Channel 4 late at night one evening. Well, to be more precise, I taped it, because it was on at some ungodly hour in the morning. Eventually I sat down and watched it, though, and was thoroughly bewildered by almost everything about it. I hadn’t really watched many foreign-language films before, so watching something with subtitles was new, and I also hadn’t really had much contact with anime before, either, so the concept of an “adult” animation (not that kind of “adult,” though there is one pair of visible boobs, albeit not in an even slightly titillating context) was also something new to me.

I think it’s probably fair to say that I didn’t really “get” Akira the first time I saw it. Those who have seen Akira will know that not “getting” it is part of the point, really; again, this was a concept that was somewhat new to me at the time I first saw it. I was used to things being much more literal, and indeed even today I do sometimes find it difficult to latch on to stuff that is being too deliberately obtuse.

Seeing it today, though, I feel I appreciated it a lot more than when I first saw it. It’s a real spectacle, all the more remarkable for the fact it came out in 1988 and thus would have been largely hand-animated. As George pointed out when we came out, a lot of things blow up, shatter and collapse in Akira, and someone had to animate each and every one of those bits of rock, glass and other miscellaneous bits of debris by hand. Quite a feat.

Akira’s also interesting for having quite a distinctive style. While recognizable Japanese in appearance, it doesn’t look like modern anime, nor does it look like stuff that came a little later in the ’90s. I’m mostly familiar with more recent anime, but ’90s stuff in particular has a very distinctive look that is a bit different from today, and Akira is different again.

One thing I thought that was quite interesting about the film’s look is that all the characters actually look like Japanese people, whereas from ’90s anime onwards, we tended to see a lot more in the way of the heavily-stylised, big-eyed look that typifies the medium today. The characters are also relatively subdued in their defining characteristics, and realistic in their appearance. Of the three female characters who put in an appearance in the movie, not one of them is intended to be “the hot one” or “the cute one” or anything like that — they’re just women. (Well, okay, one of them is a weird, wrinkled, old-looking child with blue skin, but eh.) Very progressive, particularly for 1988.

Anyway. I enjoyed myself. It was good to revisit a movie I hadn’t seen for a long time, and it was good to see friends I hadn’t seen for a long time, albeit in a situation where we couldn’t really talk a lot! Now it is 1:30 in the morning so I had probably better get some sleep.