Akira Review
アキラ

Since the Community Anime Reviews site frequently has issues, I’m republishing some of my OG reviews from there. I have corrected obvious spelling errors though. I will add new notes in parenthesis, labeled “ANB  note.”  😅 I won’t count these as part of the “Back to the Vaults” series as I have not rewatched them.

–> Buy Akira BD Collection on Amazon.com!

Community Anime Review of Akira

(ANB note: This series was originally reviewed on 09-Nov-2003.)

Review from English dub on Pioneer DVD as I couldn’t get the Japanese DTS audio to play…and (to me) it isn’t worth trying to obtain a Japanese version…

Characters

I’d forgotten I’d seen this until a co-worker let me borrow it. Then I remembered I’d seen this in Japan untranslated and thus didn’t know the story. Now I do and to be honest, it isn’t all that.

For a movie done in the late 80’s, the art and animation just rock and even still beat a lot of modern stuff. But that’s where the title ceases to excel. For starters, the character designs are bad. Rei looks like a smegging guy. So do a lot of other girls. When they do look more like girls, they are ugly. But then this isn’t the traditional soft and big-eyed anime character most of us love. These people look less anime and more “normal” if that is possible. That’s fine, just make the women look like women!

While on the subjects of characters, I didn’t care for any of them. The only (shocking) stand-out character was the military Colonel in charge of the Akira project. While a gung-ho military type, he actually cared about the Akira test children and they cared for him. So that was nice. But the so-called “hero” Kaneda was a punk at the start and a punk in the end (though slightly less of one). To be fair, I did feel a little for Tetsuo’s “girlfriend” (who’s name eludes me) because she cared for him though he didn’t care for her.

Story

The story didn’t do much for me either. I understand that this is based off of a huge manga series and so I appreciate the fact that compressing a lot of manga into a 2-hour movie means a lot of stuff can be missed. And while some people say to watch this a few times, I just am uninspired to sit through this again. At least with a bizarre title like Fooly Cooly (FLCL), there were things that made me want to watch again, even though it isn’t my kind of anime.

That said, there’s nothing about Akira that makes me want to revisit this dark world other than the hope that maybe this time, the so-called “hero” gets killed. Since that’s not going to happen, I’m just uninterested in wasting another 2-hours, especially when there’s so much more anime that I haven’t watched/reviewed.

Bottom line:

Overrated in my opinion. Now I know why I forgot about this when other Japanese stuff I saw in the 80’s stuck in my mind. Dark, dreary, poor characters, and a story which frankly annoyed me. Still, the art and animation are great even today.