Week 10: Akira

I've always heard about Akira but never really had the chance to see the movie, I never knew what it was about and based on the cover I thought it had to do with racing, I was so so wrong. Overall this has to be one of my most favorite movies so far this year. My favorite thing about the movie was the art style and how it didn't hold back with anything. I saw a lot of influence of from the movie Alien, and even some Blade Runner style buildings and tech. It also felt like the main characters were right out of the 80 (which was when the movie was made) in a very rebellious "badboy" personality. It felt very much of the times because of how the main characters were very anti-system and government. Something that was unexpected with the movie was the ending and how Tetsuo became so corrupt so quickly, and its hard to still hate him because of his backstory and how hes not entirely to blame. someone with that much pain or trauma in their life shouldn't be given that much power, and that's where the government didn't care. They just wanted a test subject for the experiments and only wanted results which ended up costing thousands of lives. On a final thought, something that I noticed about this anime was how red, and realistic the blood was. I know japan tends to do a lot of censoring by either making the blood a different color, or figuring out a way to hide it. but with this film, everything was very graphic, I wonder if this movie was made to contrast the norm in anime for the time with its use of overly graphic imagery for japans standards.