Akira

[Alphavillain]

It's an unholy mix of two very Japanese concerns: nuclear-inflected millennial angst and the boy who does not want to be a messiah but is granted with a great power. I don't think it's much deeper than that, to be honest.
Incidentally, I don't know why people look for great "depth" in anime and Manga: if you want to know about Japanese culture, short of going there, watch films like those of Shohei Imamura and others from Japan's New Wave of the 1960s.

 

[Lono Shrugged]

Kaaaoooooriiiiii!

Yeah it took me a few times to watch it and I guess that's why it's such a classic. It has a lot of depth. I do admit that the last half hour is totally overdone. It is the only Anime I consider on my massive list of favorite movies. I see the movie as an allegory for puberty. (emphasis on the GORY) in the sense of humankind gaining amazing power before it has a chance to mature and understand it. There is more to it than that obviously but I think that's why the explosion at the beginning is so iconic. It's almost like the conception of this new power.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Read the manga, it has all the story you missed out on with the movie.
I'm not even kidding here, the character Akira actually appears, half of Japan gets drugged and turned into a new country, the American army comes to fight Tetsuo...
It's a completely different experience with an amazing story.

The movie is just nice because it's well animated, but it missed out all the bits of the story that actually made sense.

My thoughts exactly.

The movie is awesome, because of Koji Morimoto's weirdness. But the comic get's down to the meat and potatoes of the story, and they are plentiful.

Like this character.

In the movie she's just a glorified extra, but in the comic she's just as important to the story as those three psychic kids. Maybe even more so.

 

[A random person]

You probably don't get it because the movie was compressing a fairly lengthy manga series (not DBZ lengthy, but still pretty long) into about 2 hours. I didn't quite understand what was happening when I saw it either.

 

[Samurai Goomba]

Akira is an over-hyped example of anime that non-japanese anime nerds throw in people's faces about how awesome and "deep" the genre is.

Yes, it can be. But Akira is not it.

the MANGA Akira is based on, the multi-volume work that lays out a hell of a lot of information, is awesome and deep. The movie is just a chunk of it, and not very well done. It's seems cool and hypable because of the ultra-violence and it's animated, something Americans weren't used to before the massive localization of anime became a norm.



And I LOVE anime, I just don't worship at the altar of Miyazaki or Ozawa.


Because Pixar IS better than Studio Ghibli.

I agree. It takes an extremely talented director to abridge massive amounts of content, and I don't think Akira really can be compressed THAT much (there's like 6 times the content of Watchmen, which I mentioned previously) and come out as something that's "good." Maybe if you've read the manga and can appreciate it from that perspective (sort of like the Battle Angel OAV, which is really only a tiny chunk of the actual story) then it works, but...

I don't really like Pixar or Ghibli. Miyazaki's always been overrated. I like Kiki, Totoro and Laputa (which is just a shameless Raiders ripoff), but that's it.

You know who isn't overrated? Masamune Shirow. Now there's a guy who's done some popular stuff, but it's popular because it's actually really good.

 

[TheNumber1Zero]

You probably don't get it because the movie was compressing a fairly lengthy manga series (not DBZ lengthy, but still pretty long) into about 2 hours. I didn't quite understand what was happening when I saw it either.

Bingo!

Of course many other people already said the same thing,I oddly found yours the most enjoyable to read.

I enjoyed that movie a lot.