Strap in, this one’s gonna get strange. There’s some street punks, there’s civil unrest, some neopolitireligiofactions, and there’s government. Then there’s some corpuscual oddities that wreak havoc. What the fuck does that even mean? Yeah, well, this one kinda visually defines that. Throw in some cool technology, and you got a decent cyberpunk adventurocalypse.
Neo-Tokyo, 31 years after the Bomb of WWIII went off in 1988. The Rebuilt City is significant, enough to where punks on their motorcycles are protecting their turf, as there’s apparently nothin better to do. But they get caught up in something beyond them. A weird zombie-lookin kid-adult. Military. Lead Gang Punk Kaneda watches his hurt budddy Tetsuo get carted off in a military helicopter after a crash on the highway. Despite having a really cool bike, Kaneda doesn’t want to let that one go. The city overall is in a state of major protests, and the cops have no issue splitting heads when they need to. Tetsuo is alive. But...different. Then, there’s the spectre of Akira. This isn’t standard story telling, at least not in the mundane kinda way. But still decently coherent and interesting to see how this next-gen kinda mutanty fuckery all plays out.
I’m not a particular connoisseur of the Animé thing (or manga, which technically this film was based on), this is probably the closest I’ve gotten to it. Especially back when I first saw this movie, can’t even say when but it’s been awhile. I have a “DVD” of it on my shelf, though. It’s weird. It’s interesting. And it looks pretty damn awesome. The background drawerings are amazingly detailed, and incorporates some nice ‘modern’ effects in the overlays in lighting and dynamics not really typical of the medium, at least not at this point in the game. Gotta say, it has a pretty spectacular scope that could only be pulled off in an animated form (again, at least for the time), and does it very well. I suspect Drugs may have been involved in the writing of this story, but in the cool way. Watch the credits and appreciate as the universe expands, and go beyond it. Fuckin motor-cycle of life, amiright?
