Despite having heard about the film for years,I've never gotten the chance to play this landmark Anime. Aware of a new 4K print,I was thrilled to find that my local Odeon was playing it in the final days before it was to close,leading to me finally meeting Akira.
View on the film:
Igniting the screen with flames of red as a motorbike drives towards the 2,212 shots, 160,000 single pictures and 327 different colors (a record in animation at the time) that draw up Neo-Tokyo, co-writer/(with Izo Hashimoto) director Katsuhiro Otomo paints a mesmerising atmosphere of ultra-stylised over-lapping images, dissolves and long panning shots towards Kaneda on his blazing red motorbike.
Filling 2000 pages of notebooks with various ideas and character designs, Katsuhiro Otomo flourishes the detailed hand-drawn animation with a stunning ease of crossing between genres/styles, from the striking shards of Anime colour dashed across the thrilling Cyberpunk biker fights/chases, changing gears into excellent wide-shots giving a real sense of perspective over the size of Akira in the Post-Apocalypse landscape.
Riding from the pages of his own Manga, Otomo is joined by co-writer Hashimoto in reflecting the animation stylisation, with a gripping criss-crossing of Sci-Fi genre,as the initial appearance of bad boy bikers driving into the heart of Neo-Tokyo, whose Post-Apocalypse status is built on a foundation of decaying corruption, which triggers the Cyberpunk Horror of Tetsuo Shima gaining telekinetic abilities that he begins to lose control, causing destruction to reign in Neo-Tokyo.
View on the film:
Igniting the screen with flames of red as a motorbike drives towards the 2,212 shots, 160,000 single pictures and 327 different colors (a record in animation at the time) that draw up Neo-Tokyo, co-writer/(with Izo Hashimoto) director Katsuhiro Otomo paints a mesmerising atmosphere of ultra-stylised over-lapping images, dissolves and long panning shots towards Kaneda on his blazing red motorbike.
Filling 2000 pages of notebooks with various ideas and character designs, Katsuhiro Otomo flourishes the detailed hand-drawn animation with a stunning ease of crossing between genres/styles, from the striking shards of Anime colour dashed across the thrilling Cyberpunk biker fights/chases, changing gears into excellent wide-shots giving a real sense of perspective over the size of Akira in the Post-Apocalypse landscape.
Riding from the pages of his own Manga, Otomo is joined by co-writer Hashimoto in reflecting the animation stylisation, with a gripping criss-crossing of Sci-Fi genre,as the initial appearance of bad boy bikers driving into the heart of Neo-Tokyo, whose Post-Apocalypse status is built on a foundation of decaying corruption, which triggers the Cyberpunk Horror of Tetsuo Shima gaining telekinetic abilities that he begins to lose control, causing destruction to reign in Neo-Tokyo.