Can you explain to me what the hell was that???
I loved Akira, but at the end I had a great discussion with my friends about it and couldn’t get to a resolution. can we get to one?
I used to collect the comic books and have owned both the VHS and the DVD.
In the end Akira and Tetsuo essentially combined life forces and became a new being altogether. I liked to think of it as they were rebirthing a god.
I have the vague impression that the kids had triggered some kind of parallel universe and that we were seeing the big bang of that universe. The kids were like gods in that universe and they would eventually be able to control it. I don’t remember the specifics of the final scene so I wouldn’t be able to give detailed arguments for this but this was the impression I got when I saw the film.
About Akira itself I have mixed feelings . I found it unpleasant and incoherent but also quite interesting ,in its own way, especially on second viewing. IMO Ghost in the Shell is a better film and most Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli films are far better.
One thing about Akira – its graphic novel runs 6 volumes and over two thousand (2,000) pages. That calls for a whole lot of compacting and plotline/scene/character selectivity to fit into a single feature-length film. Contrast Ghost in the Shell, whose novel is barely 348 pages and half of that was right out from the movie.
Akira should have definitely been a series, rather than a 2 hour feature. I think if i read the graphic novels first, I would have been severely disappointed with the movie.
Read the manga. It clears things up, sorta.
I wish I could get my hands on the manga, that movie led to a lot of doubts and questions, but since i haven’t seen it recently, I can’t name specific things… I’m probably going to rent it and ask dopers about this things.
Question: Did you watch the new Pioneer release (if you watched it on DVD then the answer is yes) or did you watch the old Streamline version? The Pioneer version does a better job with the exposition which makes the film much more understandable on the first watch through. The dialog in the Streamline version is much more clunky and just speeds through much of the basic facts you need.
The movie is radically different from the manga except for in the starting point and some of the basic concepts. That’s not a bad thing since Otomo started the movie long before he even came up with an ending for the manga and recognized that the manga story wouldn’t work in a film and vice versa. So he created a seperate story using most of the same elements for the movie. As a result reading the manga isn’t likely to clear up any points on the film unless you’re completely lost.
Nah, the movie isn’t really radically different. It just has the action move a lot faster. The character’s dialogue (at least if you watch the subtitled version) is taken straight from the comics. It seems more like a commercial for the comics though but that is basically what I think anything that has a much larger background story has. The movie took out most of the army’s exposition, most of the kid’s exposition, most of Kaneda’s exposition, most of the resistance’s exposition, almost all of the Joker’s exposition (the rival motorcycle gang), and some of Tetsuo’s exposition.
They also didn’t explain Akira too well either. He had bigger “cut scenes” in the comics where the kids talked about him more. I remembered when I first watched the movie I could point out which comic number (not the graphic novel version but the actual comics) the scene came from. It has been a while since I have read the comics though. It was pretty faithful to the comics as much as a 2 hour movie can be to a 2000 page book. They took bits and pieces from every comic book save the ones that focused more on the army and the Jokers.
Anything that chops something up that much is likely not to have the entire story displayed. Like I said earlier, it views more like a teaser for the comics. Ie, all this stuff happens in the comics and more. Read them and be amazed the movie seemed to state.
I know some people who have watched the dubbed version come out of it much more confused than those who watch the subtitled version.
Apparently not everyone who hears the dubbed actors pretending to be kids realizes that the freaky looking small people are actually children, and think they’re aliens or dwarfs or something.
With the subtitles, you realize that they’re actually kids-- which changes things quickly.
Even leaving aside the fact that the movie and manga clearly divide around volume two (out of six) of the current Dark Horse release (roughly issue eight of thirty-two of the old Marvel/Epic release; before someone says something the thirty-third issue was just new art) the movie clearly is building to a conclusion at that point when similar plot elements in the manga are just bridges to the next part of the story. So the pacing, the style, the climax, and the fact that two-thirds of the manga didn’t exist when the movie was made puts it solidly in the “radically different” column.
The movie was restructured to be a, well, movie. You don’t need 90% of that exposition because all of those plot elements that those particular bits of exposition required were removed. All you need to know about the army for the movie is that the colonel and the current leadership don’t get along and they run psychic experiments. All you need to know about the kids is that they’re the results of those experiments and the army controls them. All you need to know about Kaneda is that he’s a punk and Tetsuo’s friend. All you need to know about the Jokers are that they’re a rival gang.
About the only plot element in the movie that didn’t get the exposition it needed was Akira himself (which was supposed to be a shocking revelation anyways) since you don’t know why all those people think Akira is so important until very late in the movie.
Barbarian, in the new dub they clearly are children; Pioneer even had them voiced by actual children which is an exception in dubbing. Of course they weren’t really children in the sense that they were all at least forty years old but that’s beside the point.
One more thing, there’s at least five different ways you could have seen the movie. Original Japanese, the Streamline dub (the most commonly available version for quite some time), the Streamline subtitle version (which wasn’t widely available; just the laserdisk and a small VHS release a few years later), the Pioneer dub, and the Pioneer subtitles (which is effectively identical to the dub with only a few minor differences). Just talking about the movie isn’t enough; you need to identify which version you’re talking about especially since the Pioneer versions and Streamline versions are quite different.
When I first saw Akira, it was an early bootleg copy which was neither dubber or subtitled. We had to try and figure out the plotline without understanding a single word of the dialog. Now that’s confusing.
Heh, I did the same thing. On Acid.
I didn’t get too much of it from that viewing.