Akira, God's Wrath: The Movie That Changed Anime Forever

Leonardo DiCaprio and Taika Waititi are going to shoot a fiction film "Akira" based on the manga of the same name. Here's how her first film adaptation, released in 1988, changed the world of Japanese animation forever and influenced Western cinematography.

July 16, 1988. An explosion occurred in Tokyo, which almost completely destroyed the city and unleashed the Third World War. From this begins the “Akira” Katsuhiro Otomo... The main plot of the film takes place 31 years after the disaster. In 2019, the metropolis - now called Neo Tokyo - is still standing. The neon ruins are inhabited by unemployed marginalized people, religious fanatics and teenage biker gangs. While the former arrange terrorist attacks and receive batons from the police, the latter are driven among the skyscrapers on futuristic motorcycles and beat each other's muzzles. One of the bikers, Tetsuo, during another outing, knocks down a strange child with blue-green skin. Both boys are taken away by the military and placed in a secret laboratory. It turns out that Tetsuo now has unusual strength, and the government has many secrets: scientists and the military have been experimenting with children for years and have managed to develop psychic abilities in them - telekinesis, telepathy, and foresight. And it turns out it wasn't an atomic explosion that destroyed Tokyo,

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The cyberpunk animated film was born out of the manga of the same name. It was invented in 1982 by the 28-year-old comics artist Katsuhiro Otomo. Talking about what inspired the Akira manga, Otomo described Tokyo in the 1970s: “There were so many interesting people around ... Protesting students, bikers, political activists, gangsters, young homeless people. Everything that surrounded me in Tokyo, I transferred in Akira to the future, in 2019, according to the canons of science fiction. " Neo-Tokyo 2019 bears little resemblance to modern Tokyo - Otomo guessed only with the date of the 2020 Olympics and the number of skyscrapers. Another source of inspiration for the mangaka was the kissanime website series Iron Man # 28., a classic of the Japanese fur genre (science fiction with huge humanoid machines), telling about a teenager who controls a giant robot.

Initially, Akira was published in the weekly young manga magazine Young. The post-apocalyptic tale of children turned into lethal weapons quickly became a hit and read the most widely read manga of the mid-1980s - interest in science fiction never faded in Japan. And if the film adaptation contained only a few storylines (Tetsuo’s transformation, bikers led by Kaneda, experiments on children, an anti-government group, a religious cult around Akira and Tetsuo), then the manga was an expanded universe in which the characters appearing in the film on 30 seconds, had a detailed history. Also in the comics, it was told in detail about the Third World War and about Akira himself - the boy who caused the explosion.

How "Akira" became the most expensive anime

Until the 1980s, anime was filmed for children and mostly in a serial format. Science fiction dominated, but there were also animated series based on fairy tales ( "The Knight Princess" ), about animals ( "Kimba" ), and for girls ( "Heidi the Girl of the Alps", "Rose of Versailles" ). Mighty Atom remained the most popular TV series for many years. - a black and white story about a responsive robot boy named Atom (in the American version - Astroboy). He significantly influenced the development and style of anime - from the inception of the fur genre to the obligatory big eyes of characters. By the late 1970s, anime had taken over television. Many large studios specializing in full-length animated films went bankrupt, unable to withstand the competition, and young artists left out of work created small companies in which they worked on experimental netizenbuzz. At this time, the famous Studio Ghibli Hayao Miyazaki also appeared.

In the 1980s, the golden age of Japanese animation began: cartoons and TV series were watched not only by children but also by millions of nostalgic teenagers and adults. The economic boom, which peaked at the end of the decade, attracted major film companies and huge budgets to anime. This allowed Akira to become a technical breakthrough. Seven studios, including Japan's largest film company, Toho, worked on the adaptation, and had a budget of one billion yen (about $ 10 million), making it the most expensive anime of the 1980s and 1990s.

Otomo himself acted as a screenwriter and director. Akira was his first full-length project. Under his leadership, 68 key animators, colorists, and technicians worked (and about the same number of secondary employees). For days they drew Neo-Tokyo - the most impressive part of the cartoon from an artistic point of view, consisting of thousands of details - neon signs, ruins, and hundreds of skyscrapers with three-millimeter burning windows. “The hardest thing was to show the depth and scale of such a high-rise city,” explained Otomo. Particular attention was paid to color: in Akira, a record 327 colors were used, 50 of which were developed specifically for the film, for example, red acrylic - the color of the bike and Kaneda's costume.

Otomo insisted that the voiceover be recorded before the rendering and filming - "like a Disney studio." This was a revolutionary step that allowed the characters' facial expressions to match their lines. Before Akira, all the sounds in the anime were overlaid at the final stage on top of the finished animation. According to the recollections of the actors, the process of dubbing was like a radio show. Otomo personally supervised the record - he distributed manga to the actors and spoke in detail about each hero.

The soundtrack was also unusual: some of the sounds were obtained using the Synclavier digital synthesizer, and the main music was recorded by the experimental group Geinoh Yamashirogumi, consisting of hundreds of amateur musicians. The frame rate - 24 frames per second - was also an innovation, when other Japanese cartoons used 12 frames per second. According to Otomo, the frequency has been increased to bring Akira as close as possible to the cinema format. "Akira" was not like any manga fox that the viewer had seen before.

Otomo is not only a perfectionist who made artists paint every detail of Neo-Tokyo, but also a true fan of American cinema. Among the films that influenced Akira are  Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Videodrome, and even Rebel Without a Cause starring James Dean. Otomo also said that he was greatly impressed by Herbert Wells' War of the Worlds novel. However, Akira is based on a typical plot of Japanese science fiction - a reflection of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Anime characters do not prevent a nuclear catastrophe, like Western heroes, but learn to live after it.

Akira Goes West

In 1988, the Japanese invited Steven Spielberg and  George Lucas to bring the film to the States, but they refused, calling it "uninteresting for the American audience." A year later, “Akira” nevertheless reached the American audience and caused them a cultural shock. The popularity of the cartoon was several times higher than in Japan and led to a real anime boom in the West. Violence, corruption, dysfunctional adolescents, strange children with supernormal abilities, secret experiments - in the late 1980s, there was nothing like this in Western animation. In the US, cartoons were primarily aimed at children, and Akira stood out against the background of Disney 's The Little Mermaid and the naive Adventures of the Yoga Bear.... The success of the cartoon prompted Marvel to release 38 issues of the Akira manga, and the British company IWC to open a division of Manga Entertainment, which has become the largest Western distributor of anime.

Also, not in the wake of success, European and American publishers began to translate other sci-fi and cyberpunk stories: "Ghost in the Shell", "Dominion", "Apple Seed" by Masamune Shiro, "Xenon" by Masaomi Kanzaki and "Battle Angel Alita" by Yukito Kishiro ( 30 years later, “Ghost in the Shell” and  “Battle Angel Alita” received their Hollywood film adaptations).

Influence on anime and Hollywood

In its homeland, Akira became the starting point for the cyberpunk wave that captured Japanese animation in the 1990s. Following the Otomo film, the Japanese began filming other popular manga in this genre ( Goku: Midnight Eye, Edo Cyber ​​City, Weapon Dreams ). One of the most famous examples is the “Ghost in the Shell” by Mamoru Hosea, who was also a huge success in Japan and the West. In the 1990s, hero forge finally ceased to be a product for a children's audience. Like Akira, TV shows and films of the time shocked viewers with the amount of violence and eroticism.

Without the "Akira" there would be not only the "Ghost in the Shell" and  "Evangelion", but also, for example, copyright Anime Satoshi Kon, who pay attention to details so as fanatically as Katsuhiro Otomo, or space western "cowboy Bipop", released in the late 1990s. In addition, Akira has influenced dozens of Western directors. He is quoted by the Wachowskis in  The Matrix, Alex Proyas in the fantasy noir Dark City, Ryan Johnson in  The Loop of Time, and the Duffer brothers in Stranger Things, who have taken as many characters from the anime into their show as from the American sai. -file classics.

The influence of "Akira" is also in the animated film "Isle of Dogs" by Wes Anderson, and even in  "The Dark Knight" by Christopher Nolan, who borrowed a gang of clowns from the anime eyes. Michael Jackson and his sister Janet confessed their love to Akira in the video for the song Scream and Kanye West in the clip  Stronger. And the scene with spectacular braking Kaneda repeated in a dozen animated series - from  "Pokemon" to  "Adventure Time".

A game remake of Akira

In 2002, Warner Bros. acquired the rights to the Akira game remake. At the beginning of the 2000s, the Hughes brothers planned to shoot the film, and Keanu Reeves was the main contender for the role of Kaneda. However, the matter did not go beyond rumors. In 2011, the studio returned to the discussion and suggested starring Zac Efron, Ezra Miller, and  Kristen Stewart. In 2019, Warner Bros. finally started working on the Hollywood version of Akira.

The remake will be handled by Leonardo DiCaprio's production company Appian Way. The director's chair will be taken by Taika Waititi. Filming will begin in the coming months in California. The state gave DiCaprio an $ 18.5 million tax break. Fans of Akira in 1988 have already opposed the Hollywood remake, which is rumored to take place in Los Angeles, not Tokyo. However, Katsuhiro Otomo assured  them that all plot changes would be consistent with him: "I put forward one important condition for a feature film: I must review and approve the script." Presumably, the adaptation of Akira by Taiki Waititi will be released in the spring of 2021.