365 Films: Day 2, Akira (1988)
Jan. 2nd, 2012 09:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scriptamanetSo Akira is a pretty good movie.
I know it was incredibly ahead of its time, but I'm still kind of astonished by the fact that this movie was made in 1988. What a fucking tour de force for animation. The scene where they put Tetsuo in the MRI-scanner-but-not-really was especially stunning.
I think one of my favorite things about anime is that it so often has no patience for exposition. Things happen, and you either understand them or you spend hours researching it afterwards, but because of that, you're not necessarily penalized for not picking everything up. Not having a full understanding of what's going on has relatively little impact on enjoyment of the story. I can see how it could be infuriating to people, but I find it a really relaxing break from works like American tv dramas, which can't help using exposition and are so obvious about it. I don't fully understand the significance of Tetsuo's psychic dreamvisions (?) about giant stuffed animals slowly melting into "milk" (yeah, sure buddy), but that sequence was still incredibly unsettling, and that's terribly impressive.
The music's unsettling, too, in a really, really good way. I haven't taken the chance to listen to the soundtrack (although I will), but whichever track is the techno built around gasping is equal parts painful and breathtaking.
Look, Akira is really fucking good, and having seen I now find the idea of a white-washed adaptation in New York even more preposterous, but also more sad. Is the quality of our art so low that we need to appropriate an incredible work that also happens to be closely tied to the country its set in? Just make your own movie, for fuck's sake. At any rate, go watch it, even if you don't like anime. This is the kind of movie that transcends that.
I know it was incredibly ahead of its time, but I'm still kind of astonished by the fact that this movie was made in 1988. What a fucking tour de force for animation. The scene where they put Tetsuo in the MRI-scanner-but-not-really was especially stunning.
I think one of my favorite things about anime is that it so often has no patience for exposition. Things happen, and you either understand them or you spend hours researching it afterwards, but because of that, you're not necessarily penalized for not picking everything up. Not having a full understanding of what's going on has relatively little impact on enjoyment of the story. I can see how it could be infuriating to people, but I find it a really relaxing break from works like American tv dramas, which can't help using exposition and are so obvious about it. I don't fully understand the significance of Tetsuo's psychic dreamvisions (?) about giant stuffed animals slowly melting into "milk" (yeah, sure buddy), but that sequence was still incredibly unsettling, and that's terribly impressive.
The music's unsettling, too, in a really, really good way. I haven't taken the chance to listen to the soundtrack (although I will), but whichever track is the techno built around gasping is equal parts painful and breathtaking.
Look, Akira is really fucking good, and having seen I now find the idea of a white-washed adaptation in New York even more preposterous, but also more sad. Is the quality of our art so low that we need to appropriate an incredible work that also happens to be closely tied to the country its set in? Just make your own movie, for fuck's sake. At any rate, go watch it, even if you don't like anime. This is the kind of movie that transcends that.
