Have you ever experienced something that looks so irrelevant at first, but then it takes you on a spiritual journey? Well, Akira is one of such things that might appear as the story of a biker gang, but it is much more than it. Akira is not just an ordinary anime produced to entertain you, Akira is taken from a Japanese manga, and then it was shaped into an inspirational anime movie. This movie was a great success of its time with its influential story, background music, and famous Akira Jacket.
This movie follows the story of a city, which has been rebuilt after being destroyed badly. That city was one of Japan’s important cities, named Tokyo and renamed Neo-Tokyo. This city was suffering from every kind of damage at that time. From protests against governments, violent processions to biker gangs crimes, everything was so common in this city. Among all the biker gangs, there was a biker gang named Capsule, which was led by a boy named Shotaro Kaneda.
This whole movie revolves around Shotaro and his friend, Tetsuo. Even though this movie’s title is Akira, Akira himself never appeared fully in it. The story began when Tetsuo got unknown psychic abilities from an unusual kid, escaping from the government. The turn of events and fights for love and friendships makes this movie a lot more interesting. This movie was the reason when everyone legitimately started paying attention to anime and manga.
Akira wasn’t just turned out to be the greatest experience by chance, and it was fueled with the blood and sweat of the whole team. The entire world gathered under one platform which has a single purpose; loving and praising Akira with whole hearts. Otomo was not only a genius man, but he also had a great influential mind. His illustrations of Akira turned out to be perfect. They predicted a future you can now witness by yourself; everything in Akira is now a part of many states in the world.
Has it ever occurred to you how much time and effort the whole team put in to make this movie a cultural and historical gem? Well, Otomo not only illustrated this movie, but he also worked as a producer for this project. He agreed to turn this manga into anime on one condition; he said that he would only work on this manga if he could do justice with it. It was very unusual to hear this from someone who has worked on millions of anime.
Though this man actually put a lot of effort into this project and not just efforts, he even invested a lot of money. This 2000 pages anime cost him $10 million, yes, freaking $10 million, and Otomo was putting his money at risk as he had no idea that this movie is going to be a huge success, not for itself, but the anime industry too. So Otomo finally got complete control with a budget of his choice, and thankfully, this man knew how to make it all worth it.
If you are into the anime world, you’ll have the idea that Akira had highly unexceptional graphics. It was animated with around one hundred and sixty thousand animation cels, which was almost double than the usual anime. Dialogues of this movie were recorded before its animation so that the designers could work on lip-syncing, unlike the usual flapping lips of other anime characters.
The result of this effort came out as the anime with the sharpest graphics and smoothest actions. You won’t even feel like you are watching an anime movie from three decades before; it’ll more feel like a live-action movie. Even when Akira wasn’t revealing its comprehensive animation, it was showing how to use negative space and lighting. It all will have gone in vain if it is not about the best story and out of the world concept. With all the team and his efforts, it took Otomo two years to finally release this project.
People can still feel the beat that Akira created thirty-three years ago, the way it shattered the earth with its huge success. This movie inspired so many upcoming anime and even Hollywood movies. To date, it is one of the best sellers anime from the Japanese anime industry. This movie even paid attention to little details, and that’s what we all love about this movie, which kind of turned the sci-fi genre a little upside down. With its outstanding performances, exceptional graphics, stellar cinematography, future predictions, badass Akira Jackets, and above all, captivating story, Akira has set the bars so high, almost impossible to reach. There have been rumors that this movie is going to be remade, but fans are furious over it as no one can fill the shoes of Otomo, kind of an impossible thing to achieve.
