Akira

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Akira (アキラ, Akira^?) is a 1988 animated film by Katsuhiro Otomo based on his manga of the same name. The movie led the way for the growing popularity of anime in the West, with Akira considered a forerunner of the second wave of anime fandom that began in the early 1990s. One of the reasons for the movie's success was the highly advanced quality of its animation. At the time, most anime was notorious for cutting production corners with limited motion, such as having only the characters' mouths move while their faces remained static. Akira broke from this trend with meticulously detailed scenes, exactingly lip-synched dialogue (voices were recorded before the animation was completed, rather than the opposite — a first for an anime production) and superfluous motion as realized in the film's more than 160,000 animation cels.

While most of the character designs and basic settings were directly adapted from the original 2000-plus page manga epic, the restructured plot of the movie differs considerably from the print version, pruning much of the last half of the book.

Notable themes of the film include youth culture, delinquency, social unrest and future uncertainty weighed against the historical spectre of nuclear destruction and Japan's post-war economic revival. This pervasive atmosphere of impending doom is set to fuse in the feature's tag line, "Neo-Tokyo is about to E•X•P•L•O•D•E."

Plot summary

The story takes place in the politically volatile city of Neo-Tokyo, built over Tokyo Bay after an unexplained explosion inciting World War III destroyed the original city in 1988. The cataclysm is revealed to have been caused by the frightening psionic powers of a child, Akira, who had earlier been the subject of a secret government research project for the development of psychokinetic abilities.

Thirty-one years later, in the year 2019, a gang of teenage bikers led by a smug teenage delinquent named Kaneda find themselves involved in a street fight with a rival gang called the Clowns. Tetsuo Shima, Kaneda's best friend, having pursued two Clown members in the abandoned Tokyo, finds a wizened child (Takashi, one of the Espers, who has just been kidnapped from a government facility), blocking his path. As Tetsuo tries to avoid the him, his bike inexplicably explodes. When the gang arrives at the scene, several military helicopters arrive. Led by Colonel Shikishima, armed soldiers take Takashi and Tetsuo away. Kaneda and his friends are arrested.

Read more at Wikipedia.org