Akira (1988)

Kaneda (2001 Pioneer dub): Hands up now! Where in the hell is the frickin baby room?

30 years ago Katsuhiro Otomo dreamed of a frightening, fantastic, brutalist future. His vision has dominated Anime and even Western animation since. The impact is so profound as that it is difficult to find any Anime since that doesn't draw on Akira as inspiration or as source material.

Here's what's wild.  I watched the 2001 version blueray 1280 and honestly, I couldn't tell the difference between Akira and any anime released since on a technical level. It is bloody, gory, and stunning.

To the point, if you haven't seen Akira, it's never too late.

4.1 out of 5 stars. -the plot is a little hard to follow but that's not the point.

Now to geek out.  So, it is currently 2018 and Akira is set in 1988's future of 2019- next summer to be exact.  And Tokyo is preparing for the summer games of 2020. Yeah....that's true in both our present and their neo-future.

1.  How did Katsuhiro Otomo know that Tokyo would win the Olympic bid for 2020 what with him destroying Tokyo as a part of WWIII?
2. Did someone in the Japanese government around 2000 just think that it would be cool to emulate the future of Akira?

But, my chief thought was why has the technology that they envisioned for our now not happened? For example....why did they think that biker gangs on high-end motorcycles would still be a thing? I've done some checkin with now and not only are biker gangs kinda dated, but motorcycles aren't all that different from what was available in 1988. Is it just that motorcycles embody teenage rebellion and thus it was easy to co-opt it as a future vehicle rather than invent something wild?

Finally, my thought process on gore has always been that each success attempt at producing nausea or disgust in audiences is met by someone or some concept that can 1-up it.  Gore is a field of escalaction dominance.  The most recent is a linear process from what came before.   But, then why does the viscera in Akira still make me wince when it's been out of date for 30 years. It's as if the laws of time and inoculation don't apply.