Day: January 3rd, Movie: 3

Today’s entry in the Genre-ary Sci-Fi DailyView is the classic Anime animated film, Akira from 1988. This animated movie was adapted from a manga of the same title.

Right off the bat, I want to say that I watched the English dubbed version of this. Usually in live action, I try to watch the English subtitled version instead of the dubbed, but I did not think that the animated film would matter much. However, I was wrong. The dialogue and the voice acting of the English dub was poor and it took a lot of my concentration to focus in on the film with the distractions. If I had it to do it again, I would go with the Japanese voice/English subtitles version.

But I did not choose that one and so my opinion on the film is tainted a touch.

According to Rotten Tomatoes, “In 1988 the Japanese government drops an atomic bomb on Tokyo after ESP experiments on children go awry. In 2019, 31 years after nuking the city, Kaneda, a bike gang leader, tries to save his friend Tetsuo from a secret government project. He battles against anti-government activists, greedy politicians, irresponsible scientists and a powerful military leader until Tetsuo’s supernatural power suddenly manifest.”

The animation was amazingly cool for the year. It may not be up to the quality of animation today, but there was a special quality to it that made it work very well with this story. It definitely had that Anime feel to it and you can tell how this inspired all kinds of Anime films that followed it.

I had a little trouble getting into the story at first, but as the story progressed, I became more interested in what the movie was trying to show. There were some high concepts in the story and some impressive science fiction themes.

I enjoyed this movie, but I would be lying if I said that the dialogue and the English voice acting did not affect my overall feelings of this version. I still like this, but I would have liked to have seen the film the way it was meant to be seen.