Product Details

Product Description In 1988 the landmark Anime film AKIRA by director Katsuhiro Otomo defined the cutting edge of Anime around the world. By today s standards Akira remains the pinnacle of cel animation and retains the explosive impact of its highly detailed animation and its intensely violent saga of power and corruption. Neo-Tokyo has risen from the ashes of World War III to become a dark and dangerous megalopolis infested with gangs and terrorists. The government seethes with corruption and only maintains a token control over the powerful military that prevents total chaos and hides the secrets of the past. Childhood friends Tetsuo and Kaneda plunge into Neo-Tokyo s darkest secret when their motorcycle gang encounters a military operation to retrieve an escaped experimental subject. Tetsuo captured by the military is subjected to experiments that make him a powerful psychic but unfortunately for Neo-Tokyo Tetsuo s powers rage out of control and he lashes out at the world that has oppressed him! Nothing can stop the destructive forces that Tetsuo wields except possibly the last boy to destroy Tokyo. 11537 + Sticker and Insert as Follows (15 000 units only) Sticker: Akira Tattoo Included Insert: Akira Tattoo Amazon.com Artist-writer Katsuhiro Ôtomo began telling the story of Akira as a comic book series in 1982 but took a break from 1986 to 1988 to write direct supervise and design this animated film version. Set in 2019 the film richly imagines the new metropolis of Neo-Tokyo which is designed from huge buildings down to the smallest details of passing vehicles or police uniforms. Two disaffected orphan teenagers--slight resentful Tetsuo and confident breezy Kaneda--run with a biker gang but trouble grows when Tetsuo start to resent the way Kaneda always has to rescue him. Meanwhile a group of scientists military men and politicians wonder what to do with a collection of withered children who possess enormous psychic powers especially the mysterious rarely seen Akira whose awakening might well have caused the end of the old world. Tetsuo is visited by the children who trigger the growth of psychic and physical powers that might make him a superman or a supermonster. As befits a distillation of 1 318 pages of the story so far Akira is overstuffed with character incident and detail. However it piles up astonishing set pieces: the chases and shootouts (amazingly kinetic amazingly bloody) benefit from minute cartoon detail that extends to the surprised or shocked faces of the tiniest extra; the Tetsuo monster alternately looks like a billion-gallon scrotal sac or a Tex Avery mutation of the monster from The Quatermass Experiment; and the finale--which combines flashbacks to more innocent days with a destruction of Neo City and the creation of a new universe--is one of the most mind-bending in all sci-fi cinema. --Kim Newman Set Contains: Katsuhiro Ôtomo s Akira is often described as the movie that created a mass audience for Japanese animation in America. Akira looks better now in this remastered DVD than it did on its original release: dust dirt and scratches have been digitally removed and the color has been rebalanced. It also makes more sense in a new translation. The ending still leaves many questions unanswered (which is not unusual in anime) but the convoluted plot is easier to follow than it was in the initial English version. --Charles Solomon.