View User's Journal

[-:SPOILERS CONTAINED, DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE 'AKIRA' OR THE MANGA:-]
[Unless you do not intend to, if you don't, go right ahead.]

Hello, to my loved ones, friends, enemies and stalkers
[and those who somehow happen to be all four]

I've decided to start doing something that I've never voiced before to the public ear, or written to the public eye. I figured that my journal on gaia would be an intriguing place to start. I'm going to be watching a series of movies that may or not have anything to do with each other, and I will be scrutinizing them very carefully to put together a venerable analysis of the motion picture, whether it be animated or filmed in real life, or both at the same time. This is becoming a personal hobby of mine, and only that, but if you enjoy my opinions on things you may seriously find these journal entries of a great interest to you.

My journey begins now with a film that I just viddied today, a movie that as a younger Elie I truly loved, even though I have grown out of my phase of appreciating the silly artistic direction and inept writing skills of those who pioneer the popular genres of manga and it's media baby 'anime', I have to say that this movie above many actually has a serious and mysterious message.

The film which I speak of, of course, is AKIRA. This film, first released to international acclaim in 1988, and given the prestigious yet unofficial label as the one anime title which started the whole craze in western society for Japanese culture. The film is an animation that fairly inaccurately follows the story, but religiously follows the art style of the previously released manga (also named 'AKIRA') about a gang of motor punks in Neo Tokyo, a city build on the bones of Tokyo japan, (noted in this film to have been destroyed during the third world war in 1988 by a force undetermined.). Some parts of the story were left out, (as they usually are, in movies), because the movie already was becoming extremely long. I've read the manga myself several times, so I'll fill in the blanks in my explanations. The story follows up specifically on the two central characters, gang leader 'Shotaro Kaneda', a hardy bike punk and daredevil, and another member of the gang 'Tetsuo Shima', who happens to be Kaneda's best friend since childhood. Tetsuo, as those who have seen the movie know, may well be recognized as the main character because of the dynamics of his role in the story, but with that opinion I truly do not agree. This is a very western seeming drama, it's a story about an anti-hero who becomes a self defined hero. Kaneda is that hero, and therefore I believe that he is the main character.

The story begins in the year 2019, in the aforementioned 'Neo Tokyo'. The city is running amok with protests of all kinds from all sides. The student unions are protesting their learning conditions, the city middle-class is complaining about the violence used to quell the student protests, and the religious cult of the mysterious 'Lord Akira' is preaching on a city-wide level that the 'God' Akira will soon return, and he will reek havoc as he did before if you do not follow him. The army is everywhere, and the government is snooping into the affairs of the students and protesters, while revolutionary groups grow into their ranks from the inside.

The bike gang in the beginning couldn't care less about any of the above, because they are below the strain. They are vocational students all, at the lowest educational program in all of Japan, and they have their hands all tied up with a violent bike gang rivalry, their war with the 'Clowns', a much larger and much more violent bike gang who's members dress in strange clown outfits in order to both show who they are and that they're a proud clown, and to hide their true identities from the law while they run rampant on their crime sprees... But when Tetsuo was taken away by government officials after a freak explosion on the highway directly after a bike battle with the clowns due to the seeming powers of a small gray child, Kaneda and the boys fall into a mood of confusion and anger at society where their adorexia used to be. Tetsuo in the meantime is put through intensive medical and scientific study.

This is the theme of my analysis, the study that he underwent. The study of his abilities due to his ability now to control energy since his immediate contact the the boy.

The movie is more than an action packed adventure, it's even more than a story about a futuristic coup d'etat, it is a theory on how psychic energy could well create what is more or less a universe. The ultimate of ultimates, and unleashing the potential to become that ultimate reality. There are three gray children, the 'Espers', in the movie, but back in old Tokyo when they were the subject of obsessive study, there were many, but of the noteworthy ones there were four. The religious leader of the cult following Akira (who's name and identity was left out of the movie), was Lady Miyako, who as a child was found to have special powers, but refused the medications which the other Espers took. The three in the movie were the last alive of the treated Espers in the late 80's, Kiyoko, Takashi, and Masaru. The fourth, and the perfect, was Akira, the . A simple child, but a perfect child, a child who disobeyed logic in each test, and his power was not only furious and impossible to understand, it was the perfect of designs. The energy emitted from the simple generation of his opinions created a dome, his sense of justice after the scientists killed him to dissect and study his body lead to the destruction of Old Tokyo. Against popular knowledge, his unintentional destruction of Tokyo was what lead to the III World War.

When Tetsuo came into contact with the knowledge that the ultimate of energies was in every human body, he went insane and began to receive messages from Akira, the face of the child, the heart of the child, images of the future, and a maddening repetition of the name. AKIRA. He escaped his bonds and went wild, abusing his newfound powers. The religious groups aforementioned believed that he himself was Akira.

Tetsuo in the end found the dissected parts of Akira in their hiding place under the Old Tokyo coliseum. Kaneda appeared right afterward, his falling in with a pretty girl named Kei, a young woman who turned out to be part of a spy organization that was working to relinquish the last three Espers from their study conditions contained by the government of Japan. After Kei, who was given power by all three of the Espers, had a showdown with Tetsuo (who bested her only to be distracted enough for Kaneda to destroy his arm with a shoulder cannon.), the three Espers began to pray before the remains of little Akira. Tetsuo, thinking nothing of his flesh wound, summoned a new arm out of metal parts he found in the wreckage he'd made of the coliseum. After an impromptu time of quiet, Tetsuo's girlfriend Kaori arrived at the coliseum to find Tetsuo suffering a horrible transformation.* [See Below]

Tetsuo had gotten to the point of his final limit of power, and his body could no longer take the power of his mind, it escaped from his control and began to grow. He became a horrible monstrosity. The creature he becomes consumes the entire coliseum, and along with the coliseum it swallows Kaneda and Kaori, and the Resurrection of Akira that had only just been completed. My personal favorite line in the whole movie is when Tetsuo screams pleadingly to Kaneda as his body begins to crush them, because he loves them both, but he could feel them dying.

"Kaneda, Save her, Kaori! She's dying... KAORIII! Kaori's pain is coming into me... RUN KANEDA, RUN."

As his twisted form began to spill over the brim of the coliseum he began to burst from within. This sudden blaze of light and fury was the power of Akira. The event of total destruction which had come about thirty one years before came full circle as Akira destroyed Tetsuo's body, and flew Kaneda safely away to the old city with Kei and the last remaining member of the bike gang, Kaisuke, who's best friend Yamagata was crushed earlier on by Tetsuo.

As Neo tokyo was swallowed, all was left to be re made, through ultimate destruction came ultimate peace, and the end to the conflicts of the city, and Tetsuo's malignancy was gone to be replaced with the understanding of the 'place where we can't go, because we are not big enough yet', according to the Espers. The very end of the movie is and image of flying stars, and an obsidian mass of energy in the form of a nova, an image evocative of what may well be the immediate results of a big bang. Whatever that great force was, it spoke in the simplest of words.

'I... Am ... Tetsuo."

I personally believe that in the ultimate end, his power went from his body, a power fully aware of it's potential, and as Akira intended to, he created a new universe from his own power, and left the world behind as it would honestly be better without the fateful hand of the Espers.

Well I hope you enjoyed my insight, I enjoyed writing this. I'd love some comments and opinions of your own. This is a first try at being subjective on a good film, but I don't want anyone to be merciful. Bombard me.

*This monstrosity has appeared as Cartman's Dawson's Creek Futura S 2000 Trapper Keeper in episode 13 of the 4th season. This episode was mostly a joke on the American Presidential Election System, and on Arnold Schwarzenegger's 'Terminator', but the monstrosity that Cartman becomes when the trapper keeper binds with him is based on the abomination which became of Tetsuo in AKIRA.

Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

More Information