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Akira アキラ

( it. Akira アキラ )

Manga: color and b / w, Japan, Kodansha , 1982 , drawings and story by Katsuhiro Otomo

Anime: color Japan, 1988 , written and directed by Otomo Katshuiro

Length: 124 min .

Genre: Cyberpunk

Who does not know Japanese culture can not deeply understand Akira. For the average user, it might be a story among many, yet another iteration of cyberpunk, one example among many of how a kind of science fiction has caught on much in vogue at the time the print media and on the big screen. Nothing could be more superficial. Akira coexist and live together in all fifty years of Japanese history prior to the work at the same time layered in a complex visual narrative-only, a chasm that has opened unprecedented media and artistic, in which many others are deeply involved, revolutionizing the way of manga and anime in Japan, and the way in which the West against this world without equal.

Generation Akira

Akira is a revolutionary cry.

fundamental break point in the production of Japanese manga Katsuhiro Otomo's masterpiece is the merciless portrait of our times, through a different way of seeing things. It 's a world where teenagers are now without a guide, are common to themselves, are organized in sub-cultures and sub-companies, which dominates the law of the strongest - the classic example is the vision of the future of the school Otomo , a worrying point at which the arrival of this seems to aim at.

This way of representing the near future by Otomo, is a clear sign from the author of social revolution. Japan is a country embedded and frozen in extremely rigid social conventions, that affect all relationships between people, encrypting gestures, words, even the looks. It 's a world apart, that Westerners often do not understand, or underestimate widely. Compliance with these rules is essential, and values \u200b\u200bsuch as honor, respect for the elderly, its usefulness in the context of the development of the country, are of fundamental importance. Even those who rebel in Japan is ordered with composure.

The vision of a future in which social conventions in Japan have given way to a wild anarchic structure in which no value has more importance than simple law of survival, is somewhat unsettling to a world like the one just described above.

Inhabitants di Neo-Tokyo vedono la loro città invasa da truppe di teppisti, che qui vengono mostrati come capaci di aggirare ogni tentativo di ricostituire l'ordine. Sono arbusti spinosi cresciuti sotto i semi dell'anarchia post-bomba e post-moderna, annegati in un mare di tecnologia a buon mercato che li libera da molti vincoli prima impossibili da abbandonare. La gioventù di Akira domina la società giapponese in netta contrapposizione alla rigida struttura del passato, rappresentata dai militari, qui visti come massima autorità, addirittura al di sopra dei politici, che solo apparentemente sembrano manovrare le vicende.

Kaneda e Tetsuo, i due protagonisti assoluti della vicenda, sono due teppisti, senza prospettive, senza illusions, deeply addicted to their lives without law and morality, drug addicts, even in full control of their lives, some more than others.

Kaneda Tetsuo seems to understand most of the rules of the road, and seems to see a minimum of honor, duty and sense of brotherhood, or the traditional values \u200b\u200bof Japan lost in the ruins of a crumbling world. Tetsuo for this can not be a true leader, a ruler, albeit with a result of any physical potential to be.

The scene of the school at the beginning of the film, it is the essential element that allows young viewers to understand how Japan could be the world tomorrow, and the elderly as his mistakes could afford. From this point of view, Akira marked the beginning of a new generation of fiction, where perhaps the idyllic vision of a Japan that ignores the current crisis to propose a watered down version of the future, is clearly stepped on, hit the bike red Kaneda. Although others had walked this path, the clash of generations in Akira is physical, as a direct stomach. Soon the future becomes the Akira possible future not only of Japan but all over the world, opening a gap between generations and between cultures, investing as a hammer all over the world, making a sudden appreciation of the art of manga in the eastern rest of the planet, and the message that these artists can convey, conveyed mainly by the powerful apparatus of the soul-visual media.

dovetails perfectly into this vision of social devastation, prologue that sees the nuclear apocalypse invest the capital of Japan - the only nation that has been, until now, to suffer the wounds on their skin. The war, dark spectrum of the Japanese world, because it linked to a glorious tradition of the ancient world, but also a painful and tragic outcome in the modern world, hanging over everything, bringing to memory through strong images of devastated landscapes and immense explosion black the first pages, a story that still hurts, that hangs over all i Giapponesi.

Aprendo così Akira, Otomo ci fa subito comprendere che questo è un manga che parla degli errori del passato, che li vuole affrontare, finalmente, per porli davanti agli occhi di tutti, per smettere di far finta che non esistano. E' un manga adulto, che non scenderà a compromessi, che affronterà temi difficili, come l'etica sulla manipolazione genetica, sul confine tra la tecnologia e la coscienza d'essa, sulla fragilità di un sistema politico ormai vecchio e imbolsito, e sulle difficoltà dell'uomo di convivere in una società multietnica e multiclasse, senza vivere in uno stato di conflitto sociale perenne.

Quella di Akira è una comunità allo sbando, that is so blind that they can not understand his own limitations, to understand the situation now that we got out of hand for too long. A world that relies indirectly at the hands of young people with no future who inhabit it, who try to make on its own in any situation, even when it comes to saving the world. The adult society has turned its back on them now, and you just have to roll up their sleeves and think that you can do better with what you have. Young people are simply out of control here because the previous generation did not give them the right foundation to grow in a healthy, conscious that every action has an impact on their world, and every act of destruction is a crack on a system precarious that is about to give. The everlasting reminder of cyberpunk, here caught in its vital essence from Otomo and adapted for his country, speaks a language more comprehensible through the mesh of the plot of Akira, and conveys its message through the visual element, which affects the degradation of the post-urban and the paucity of a spiritual society that is now the victim of unbridled consumerism and the god of money that now seems to have finally convinced the Japanese to end their endless quest for excellence of religious dogma.

A new system

Akira card

The visions of high school "director" Otomo, where tables were already perfect for a view of the storyboard His experience as an entertainer - close to media and then confirmed with the making of the film on - jump off, for them, uncomfortable paper, to fill our field of vision with a new overview of the art of making manga. Otomo delights us and we anguish with its typical views of palaces, towers, vegetation, concrete nightmare of urban mega-cities of today and the future, the claustrophobic architectural creatures of our own oppression, that dominate us and suffocate us, seemingly unbeatable giants who enjoy mocking us from above.

The visual impact is enormous, when the entire metropolis of Neo-Tokyo takes shape before our eyes, with everything in its place, the great detail in the waste paper in the streets. It 's a place for the soul, purely literary, the classic cyberpunk metropolis miscegenation and interests, dominated by corporations, but also a powerful and frightening mix of today's models, the cities within which we live, the melting pot of cultures and traditions in which we are immersed nth power, with a sudden exponential in its exasperation as the future moves away from us.

Otomo takes us through the streets on motorcycles Kaneda, from the standpoint of the lowest in the hierarchy, the ruthless social pyramid, and there is the cross on the run, as if the industry could suffocate suffocating anguish dell'agorafobia by any minute.

The characters are alive and raw, without scruples to act, because those who remain behind and lost, who stays firm simply falls apart. Everyone works to accomplish its purpose, and the streets of each character intersect with each other, creating a lively fresco where the plot lines proceed in a dynamic and exciting.

Only

Kaneda seems the only one who wants to lift ourselves out of this layered plot, but can not, because it must respond to one's pride but also yours, unexpected sense of duty. Just what, one of the unique characteristics of the average Japanese, their tradition, which comes up by surprise in a reckless and anarchic as Kaneda, Otomo tells us that he sees light at the end of the tunnel. Kaneda Tetsuo must stop, because it somehow feels responsible for his actions. It 's a member of his band, and despite all the powers of scary that it has, Kaneda it is still the boss, supervisor, and must stop. The bond that unites them, that of brotherhood and friendship, then, forces him to love him with even greater determination to block the road at all costs.

His stubbornness is commendable and surprising, and leads the reader to wonder what that kid could do if only society would allow him in which he lived - a return to the reflection on the mistakes of its previous generation, which has cut legs.

Tetsuo, however, is the same portrait of the degeneration of the world of Akira, which from a low parveneu suburbs, territories owned motorcycle gang, becomes the rule of God on earth, in a steep climb the steps of the hierarchy which consists of 'incredible, vertiginosità and verticality.

La follia di Tetsuo è anche quella dell'uomo che dal nulla diventa troppo potente, senza passaggi intermedi, ma soprattutto quella di chi ha talmente tanta rabbia in corpo da confondere la necessità di cambiamento con la volontà di stravolgimento dello status quo che, sotto forma di potente desiderio nascosto, attanaglia tutti gli uomini, ma che dev'esser controllata per non sfociare in un tremendo atto di distruzione totale.

La contrapposizione Kaneda/Tetsuo rende il manga Akira un'opera magistrale, dai toni epici, che verrà ricordata nei decenni a venire.

A new world

Akira screen

The transposition of film Akira has in itself perhaps the serious wrongs against narrative of 'original work, as it informs a narrative line cut in many places, a technical necessity. E 'but also an opera hall, as he opened a highway which has since been subjected to every artist who has made the largest adult entertainment on the big screen. Hence it is clear that some cuts were needed, and that just took away a storia che è, e resterà, di grande respiro, adatta per sua natura ad una trasposizione su grande schermo.

Prima di Akira, il mondo occidentale pensava che in giappone si producessero "cartoni animati" alla stregua dei lavori di Nagai di due o tre decenni prima. Opere leggere, forse emotivamente coinvolgenti, ma sempre dedicate ad un pubblico infantile - anche se, e qui si apre un'altra riflessione incompatibile in questo ambito, essi ignoravano che anche le opere di Nagai avevano per obiettivo un pubblico vasto ed eterogeneo in Giappone, e di conseguenza andavano rilette a diversi livelli di comprensione.

Quelle persone, ovviamente, si sbagliavano.

Akira ha avuto l'effetto di una nuclear bomb on the world of animation world, turning to run its kind in an art form absolute and independent, with a maturity and its obvious. After Akira the world of animation has become aware of their abilities and their untapped potential and began to dare more.

One of the key points of continuity after Akira was the film Ghost in the Shell, a true spiritual heir of this work, which has finally opened its doors to the world of Japanese animation.

The opening scenes of Akira are shocking even to the big screen, and bring alive the fear of war, nuclear, the crisis in the world of the future that is rooted in our current system.

The action sequences have all been faithfully transposed, as Otomo has always written on paper as a frame cartoons, featuring high visionary film, which proved very easy to transpose to the screen, with a continuity and integrity rarely seen in a passage from one medium to another. Kaneda's bike seems so pierce the screen, becoming an icon unique in the world, as his jacket, which is also red, with two-tone pill printed on the back - a powerful symbol of the everyday consumer applied to drugs, now a reality common drug in the world of Neo-Tokyo.

In closing, the final scenes, real tests of the Apocalypse, have become part of animation history and the collective imagination, and perhaps have never been replicated more, in their visionary force, because too powerful the passion behind their construction and artistic force that have sanctioned the claim beyond the dogma of belonging to a parent.

Akira, Olympus major world icons of animation, movies on the big screen, but especially science fiction, becoming a work-quoted, and stimulate new technologies - from the CGI, the prerecording - which will all be detected and strengthened by his successors, including Western.

A proposito di questo, c'è da dire che ancora oggi Akira ha mostrato di aver segnato particolarmente la cultura occidentale, soprattutto quella americana, dove il film ha avuto un impatto tremendo, dato che in Europa si era più vicini alle opere d'animazione giapponese, per via di una più aperta mentalità artistica in questo senso.

Oltre alle varie citazioni americane di Akira fatte da più artisti, è di questi giorni la notizia della realizzazione futura di un live-action targato USA, che, se da una parte si macchia d'essere superfluo e per nulla complementare ad un'opera già completa e alta come Akira, se non altro ci dimostra quanto l'impatto di questo lungometraggio d'animazione giapponese changed the vision of this kind was the former American society.

Akira is all this and more. Akira is the cry of a lost generation, a desperate plea for help, the bitterness of one who seeks redemption and then feeds on the anger, the awareness of being hopeless, the criticism of all that is man today, the culmination of a society in decline for too long.