#440: Akira (1988)

Director: Katsuhiro Otomo
Cast (English Voices): Johnny Yong Bosch, Joshua Seth & Wendee Lee

Akira is considered the quintessential anime film, reinvigorating the genre in the late ‘80s which led to the cult following the style holds today. Based on the first six volumes of the popular manga of the same title, Akira visualizes a post-WWIII Tokyo. Chaos fills the streets with motorcycle gangs and terrorist attacks wreaking havoc. When Tetsuo, a member of the motorcycle gang called ‘The Capsules’, almost hits an eerie looking child with his bike, his world turns upside down. The government takes him to a hospital where they find that his brainwaves are similar to Akira, a boy who has been accused of causing WWIII.

The animation for this film is phenomenal. The cityscapes are horrific yet ornate. The buildings in a post-nuclear holocaust setting are frightfully realistic, and the social disorder believable. The film is also acknowledged as the first anime to feature lip-synched dialogue, allowing the style to progress into something more fluid and more appealing to the eye.

There are some beautiful scenes throughout the film – most notably a scene in which Tetsuo is hallucinating in his hospital room. Unfortunately, the plot is a bit convoluted. Akira was an enormous project, attempting to fit almost 2,200 pages of manga into a 2-hour film. I had many, many questions coming out of the film. Thankfully the IMDB message board sorted me out. I urge anyone else who has seen the film to look up the answers to their questions, because really… the movie on its own doesn’t quite do it. Still enjoyable, though!

Fun Trivia (Stolen from IMDB):

• At one point in the 1990s, Sony contemplated a live-action version of the film, but scrapped the idea when the projected budget went north of US$300 million.
• The production budget was nearly $10 Million US Dollars, a record sum in Japanese animation film.
• The movie consists of 2,212 shots and 160,000 single pictures, 2-3 times more than usual, using 327 different colors (another record in animation film), 50 of which were exclusively created for the film. The reason for this statistic is that most of the movie takes place at night, a setting that is traditionally avoided by animators because of the increased color requirements.

#488: Princess Mononoke (1997)

Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Cast (English version): Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Minnie Driver

Note: Viewed a few days ago, to help explain the closeness between this post and the previous.

Miyazaki’s first film to become widely recognized in America is the story of Prince Ashitaka and Princess Mononoke. Ashitaka comes from a village in the east where nature is worshipped and technology unheard of. When Ashitaka defends the town from an attacking giant boar who is possessed by a demon, his arm becomes possessed as well before he kills the boar and finds inside it a piece of metal inside the body. To heal the cursed arm, he travels west to find the Spirit of the Forest. In doing so, he discovers Iron Town, a city whose main source of income is their forge. Attacking the city are both the apes who want to replant the trees the humans ripped down, as well as the wolves and their human ‘daughter’, Princess Mononoke. Throughout the film, Ashitaka urges both the animals and humans to stop the violence, or else the hatred which possesses his arm will consume them all.

Miyazaki’s greatest talents are texture and landscape. Each location drawn has a feel to it, and through both the animation and the sound effects, you can almost feel the gravel under your feet or the moss on your hands. The music by Joe Hisaishi is also an accomplishment, using almost exclusively western music standards but with melodies of Japanese flavor.

I have two criticisms for the film. First, I’ve always found it just too long. There were loads of opportunities to cut down the time, and Disney/Miramax agrees with me; they tried to convince Studio Ghibli to give permission to slim down the length, but Ghibli refused. My second criticism is the voice acting. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always found Claire Danes’ voice to be very piercing, and Billy Crudup always seems to be either yelling or whispering, rarely finding a middle ground.

The film is certainly a spectacle, but this Princess Mononoke will never compare to Spirited Away.

Fun Trivia (Stolen from IMDB):

• Mononoke-hime (1997) replaced E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) as the biggest grossing film of all time in Japan until Titanic (1997).
• Hayao Miyazaki had intended to this be be his final film before retiring. Its great success led him to do another, Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001).
• Mononoke means angry or vengeful spirit. Hime is the Japanese honorific/word meaning Princess which is placed after a persons name rather than before it, as in the western system. When the films title was translated into English, it was decided that Mononoke would be left as a name rather than translated literally.