Welcome to the new installation of "This Is Awesome"! It's been a while since my last post, but I've been very busy and I couldn't decide what to write about next. So, I gave it some thought, and, uh... how about Akira?

Akira is a movie directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. It's based on a manga of the same name, also made by Otomo. It was released in Japan by Toho on July 16th, 1988. On December 25th, 1989, it had a very limited theatrical release in North America. It was received well and enjoyed fairly high scores from critics, and it's become a massive cult classic ever since it's release.

Don't let the promotional art here fool you. This isn't a racing movie, and it doesn't even have all that much to do with motorcycles. This is social commentary painted with a coat of blood and crazy. This movie is nuts, but it's so cool! It's also very violent (never explicitly gory, though), but it really fits the mood and themes of the movie.

Unfortunately, there isn't much I can say about the plot. It's there, for sure, it's just very hard to follow and there are some places where it feels incomplete. So, instead of the plot, I want to talk about what makes Akira rad: the animations. Here's a scene from early in the movie. YouTube does the movie's framerate no favors, but this should still help to illustrate just how visually stimulating Akira's animations can be. Quick warning, though: there is coarse language here. Not much, but it's there.

And this is just the start of the movie. The entire movie is animated to this standard. At the beginning, there's something else to take note of. See the sheer amount of animation frames there are to accompany dialogue? Most anime at the time, and even a lot today, accompany dialogue with static characters and two, three, maybe four frames of animation on the character's mouth. Akira did away with this with something called "pre-scoring", where the original Japanese voice actors actually spoke all of the dialogue before animating work began. This way, the animators would be able to sync a character's lip movement, frame by frame, to match the voice actor's speech patterns, facial expressions, and vocal inflections. This is an effect that's very, very rarely seen, even today. The 2002 English re-dub attempted to emulate this pre-scoring approach using individual pre-existing animation frames to match up with the English voices, and for the most part, they succeeded. There are a few places where the mouth movements don't quite match up, but it's always very close when they don't.

This movie is huge; it helped to popularize anime in the United States, and it was a landmark in animated films. It inspired things like The Matrix, Shin Megami Tensei, and Final Fantasy 7, just to name a few. Here, let me sum up its cultural influence with a single image. That's Masahiro Sakurai, dressed like the main character and mounted on a replica of his motorcycle. The guy who made Kirby and Smash Bros. Yeah, it's a pretty big deal.

Seriously, if you want to watch a gorgeously animated movie and you don't mind the occasional F-word, violence, and moments where you're like "Whaaaaaaaat?", then check out Akira. You owe it to yourself.

So thanks, Katsuhiro Otomo! You made an awesome movie! Everyone reading this is awesome, too.

TETSUOOOOOOOO!!