「Akira」の視聴体験
And that's an interesting thing to think about.
Like what sort of why was that the vision of the future back then?
I mean, the other thing that, you know, you can't think about this story
without being grateful for is that World War III didn't happen.
Welcome back to 2AM OTTACK!
I'm your host Mayu, a born and raised Japanese non-otaku, and...
I'm Cisco, an American otaku.
In this podcast, we share our reviews of anime and manga
through our distinct perspectives with commentary on Japanese culture,
history and the language.
Cisco, happy new year.
Happy new year.
This is our first episode of 2016.
You mean 26?
I guess I want to go back to the past.
Yeah, 2016 was a long time ago.
Long time ago.
But we live in 2026, which sounds like a future,
especially after watching the anime we are talking about today,
which is set in 2019.
Yeah.
And it's about Neo-Tokyo.
Yeah.
So recently we recorded 3AM OTTACK!
with our podcast team member,
and who is also a manga artist.
We all talked about Akira.
Yeah.
Specifically animation, but we did a comparison between animation and manga.
Yeah.
So we're going to dive into the world of Akira with some help.
Some help?
With some help we got from our manga artist friend.
OK, that's fair.
Before we start, we'd like to hear from you.
Share your thoughts, ideas, questions, or even suggestions
for what we should talk about.
Email us using the address in the description,
or you can use the Spotify or YouTube comment section.
So disclaimer.
Yeah.
You've watched Akira.
This was your fourth time to watch Akira?
I think so.
I'm not totally sure how many times I've seen it before.
Sounds about right.
But when was the first time you watched it?
I guess I don't really remember,
but I think I must have seen it while I was still in high school,
because by the time I got to college,
like I can't imagine having gotten to college and not having seen it yet.
So I think I must have seen it at some point in high school.
And then I definitely remember seeing it at an anime club marathon
because I probably I was probably the one who decided to show it in college.
And then I feel like I watched it again in like my late 20s
or early 30s, like probably about, you know, 10 years later.
And to just sort of be like, oh, yeah, what was this like?
Or, oh, this is famous and important. I should see it again.
And then we just watched it recently.
So I feel like I've watched it about like maybe like once
every 10 years or something for like the last 40 years.
No, 30 years. Whichever.
So maybe like every eight years or so.
I don't know. Whatever.
I think I've seen it four times.
All right. So I'm from Japan.
I was born and raised in Japan.
But I first recognized and noticed about Akira
after I moved to United States.
Yeah, because I feel like a lot of people were talking about Akira
and their favorite anime from Japan is Akira.
It's like never ever watched it before.
アニメと漫画の違い
Recently, NHK, which is like a national television in Japan,
decided to air the entire anime on TV.
So I was like, it's probably a good time for me
to finally find out what the anime is about.
So that was the motivation I had.
And I decided to watch this anime.
And what did you think?
Well, to me, I mean, OK, first of all, let me say
it was cool that time was set in 2019
because like we basically live in the future.
2026. Yeah.
So like it was like interesting to see what people back in like 1988.
88, I think, is when the movie was released.
Yeah. Or like 87.
Like, you know, author pictured
or like fantasize about the future, what the future is like.
So I like the aspect of like, oh, I'm like watching this anime from future.
Um, and it was like it was very like Hollywood style.
Like it was really busy from the very beginning to the end.
Lots of actions, lots of explosions.
Yes. And very colorful.
Yeah. And of course, bicycles, not bicycles, like motorbikes,
motorcycles, motorcycles. Of course, they are really cool.
Yeah. So I was trying to get all the information
and put it in my head and then try to figure out what is Akira?
Who are those like little like old children?
Like what's happening?
And at the end.
I was like, what did I just watch?
Like I didn't I didn't understand it.
But I'm glad I finally watched it and I can say I watched it once at least.
Yeah, that was my initial impression of Akira.
Got it. Yeah, I know.
It's so shallow to you.
No, I mean, I don't actually don't think that's true.
I think it's a pretty common experience to watch this movie
and get to the end and kind of be like, what?
You know, like I don't I don't think I got it right.
Like I think that's a that's a common response to this film.
So I don't think that's shallow.
I think that's pretty normal for for sort of a first watch.
Like it takes understanding the film or maybe watching it multiple times
to sort of put the pieces together.
And I think some of that is because it's a really long manga
that they condensed into just one movie.
And one of the ways that they did that was by
like having scenes that people who read the manga
would kind of like instantly recognize what was happening
and like put together some of the pieces based on their knowledge of the manga
or like where they have intentionally changed the order of what happens
in order to make them slightly more coherent narrative for the film,
where like the events take place in the manga over a longer span of time.
And so as a result of that compression, I think it is kind of hard
to both figure out what's going on and sort of understand it and get the plot.
You've watched animation for four times,
and after that, you read the whole manga.
That's right.
So how was your experience like after watching anime first and then go to manga?
So the manga is like amazing.
It's it's really impressive that, you know, I mean, I'm sure he had assistance
アキラの漫画と映画の比較
and stuff helping him, but the manga is kind of the product of like one dude.
Right. Who like made all the storyboards himself, I think, and decided
everything was going to happen and probably drew like most of the panels.
So the manga is incredible and it's really long.
It's much longer than the film.
And it has a lot of the same like overarching story beats,
but it also includes a lot of stuff that's not in the movie at all,
including a bunch of stuff about like people outside of Japan.
So it's really interesting.
It's it's long.
I don't know whether I sort of speed read it.
And I also read it out of order.
I read like book one, book four, book two, book three, book five, book six.
So some of this may be like me having read it out of order.
But I think there's a sort of a similar thing where
parts of the story are just like parts of the narrative are just kind of skipped.
And like you pick up later and you have to kind of fill in the gap for yourself
to be like, oh, I guess like this is what happened in between like this part and that part.
And the movie kind of helps in understanding some of the gaps in the manga to be like,
oh, well, they're trying to like show this or that or the other thing.
So they're good companions for each other.
And the stories are different because of the requirement that the movie have like an ending.
And I think the movie was made after like book three of the manga came out.
So four, five and six like had not even yet been written.
So it's got a little bit of that like George R. R. Martin thing of like they had to
end the thing before the ending was done.
And so the ending of the movie is really different than the ending of the manga.
And although I liked almost all of the manga,
they don't show you where the chapters of the original manga were in the in the book version
that I got. But what I assume is the final chapter was sort of unsatisfying to me.
Like I didn't really love the very, very end of the manga version, even though
it definitely fits with some of the themes of the overall work.
I just like I was sort of like it's not a twist exactly.
But the stuff that happens in the like last couple pages didn't like feel that satisfying to me.
Like I was kind of like, OK, I get it, I suppose.
But like at the same time, I sort of didn't love it.
And so I think after, you know, there's some characters that play
much bigger roles in the manga than they do in the movie.
Many of them are sort of different, like et cetera, et cetera.
Anyway, I think the I actually wound up liking the anime more after I finished reading the manga,
not because the anime is, quote, better than the manga,
but because I understood the anime better as a result of having read the manga.
And I appreciated some of the choices that were made in the anime
even more after having read the fuller version of the story.
And what our manga artist friend was saying was she gets kind of feel sick
アキラのテーマ
by reading his manga because the the details.
Intense.
Intense.
Yeah.
And she can feel it mentally and physically.
Yeah.
I mean, the story and the art in both the anime and the manga is like really heavy.
And particularly the scenes where Tetsuo is losing control
and sort of fusing with the things around him, I think are like, you know,
I mean, they're like grotesque and they're really detailed and they're very disturbing.
Like this is that's one of the real through lines with all four times that I watched it.
You know, the thing that really stays with you after having seen this film
is the scenes of Tetsuo's body going out of control.
It's scary and it's disturbing, but it's also kind of awesome.
You don't see that sort of thing in very many different works of art, period.
And so the amount of detail that goes into his transformation
and sort of what's happening is it's both visually stunning and like very emotionally affecting.
Yeah.
You also mentioned about like a drug part.
So one of the things that really just stood out to me
is this is an anime and a manga that deals with drug use,
which I feel like is kind of unusual for just Japanese anime, period.
Like I'm trying to think of like other things where like characters regularly use drugs,
especially recreationally.
Because like, yeah, I guess like there's like somewhere like people have like,
you know, take medicine or whatever or like use, you know, things sort of.
But like it's I feel like it's very rare for it to be like a thing people are doing to get high.
Like Japanese society looks down on that so hard and like, you know,
is so has such rigid laws about drug use that imagining a future where teenagers in Japan
sort of casually take methamphetamines is like very surprising.
Right.
From like today's perspective.
There are also I guess this is true in the anime, too.
There are nipples in both the anime and the manga in a way that like doesn't show up in
modern anime or manga very much anymore.
And it's not particularly sexy in like any of the parts.
Like it's you know, there is some nudity, but it's not like I don't know.
It doesn't feel especially titillating.
It's not very comic like.
And so in the in the treatments of both like nudity and drug use,
it feels I don't know, like of an era when showing that stuff was more OK.
And one of the real differences between the manga and the anime,
they do I think they do take some capsules in the anime also.
But I think the anime treatment of it really makes it seem more like it's
medicine for like the people as opposed to like I'm just popping a pill to like feel good.
But, you know, the back of kind of his jacket is a capsule.
The name of their gang is The Capsules.
And in the manga like it's totally it's explicit that they're like doing drugs.
Kaneda in particular doesn't seem to be an addict, but they're all in high school.
Like they're pretty young, you know,
未来のビジョンと核の恐怖
like it seems like he's getting the drugs from the school nurse who he's also like knocked up.
Like there's some stuff in there that's like, whoa, like this is like really dark
or darker than like what you would see in like a modern anime.
So I don't know.
I was like intrigued by that and, you know, made me think about,
oh, wow, that's like a really a way that like Japan really did not go,
you know, whereas like America, yeah, like drug use is much more common here.
And in some ways, like, you know, the future Japan that's envisioned from the 1980s
standpoint when the manga was written is like a much more I mean,
it's not like Japan doesn't have problems with capitalism now and
doesn't have inequality and stuff, but like it's way worse.
And like that sort of vision, I think, from the bubble years of like,
what does the future look like was like much more American,
for lack of a better way to put it than like, you know, than what Japan actually got.
And that's an interesting thing to think about,
like what sort of why was that the vision of the future back then?
I mean, the other thing that, you know, you can't think about this
story without being grateful for is that World War III didn't happen, right?
Like it's written in the 80s.
World War III seemed like a real possibility between the Soviet Union and the United States.
For like decades.
And a lot of what this manga and anime are dealing with is that sort of
fear of nuclear weapons and, you know, too much power for humans and
everybody kind of like, you know, being greedy and power hungry and
the tragic consequences that that ends up having.
And so, you know, in the story, not only does Tokyo get destroyed
once at the very beginning, it gets destroyed again at the end.
And instead, you know, in the manga, they allude to they talk a little bit more
about the events of, quote, World War III that starts in the 1980s,
where like all the major Russian and American cities get like nuked.
You never see any of that.
It doesn't actually seem to have altered the balance of power in the world.
Like the Americans still have a big fleet that shows up in the manga at the end.
But yeah, the fact that like that also didn't happen is a thing to be pretty grateful for.
音楽とアニメの影響
During what I was watching Akira,
there are like a couple of scenes that reminded me of certain animes I've watched before.
To me, the music, especially the beginning of Akira,
the BGM was very unique using human voices.
Yeah.
And there's some kind of drums.
And then the music, I've never heard of it before,
which reminded me of Paprika by Satoshi Kon.
Totally.
That movie has very unique music too.
Totally.
And also like what's going on, watching kind of feeling.
It has some like nightmare moments that really echo Akira also,
where the psychic people are sort of messing with Tetsuo, right?
Right.
And then our manga artist friend told me Satoshi Kon worked for Otomo.
アキラの影響
On this project.
Yeah.
So that makes so much sense.
Do you have any like anime that you feel like got inspired by Akira?
I mean, so much anime got inspired by Akira.
And I think I just want to echo you on the music.
The music is so iconic.
Like, you know, the use of just like breathing and stuff as part of the soundtrack is like
part of what sort of gives it its punch, right?
That it's like really sort of disturbing.
You can kind of feel it in your body as you're listening to it.
One of the first anime I ever watched was Bubblegum Crisis.
20, I think it's 20.
God, I can't remember.
They remade it and they gave it a different like number at the end.
So now I'm not sure.
I think 2030 is the original, but you know, it's set in a Neo Tokyo that looks where I
think actually that one is really cribbed from Blade Runner.
Like when I finally saw Blade, the original Blade Runner for the first time in my 30s,
I was like, oh wait, this is stolen from, oh, it's the other way around.
But Blade Runner and Akira are often mentioned in the same breath as sort of being like the
birth of like cyberpunk and the sort of like, you know, dark dystopian sci-fi aesthetic
that came out of the mid 80s.
And you can really see its influence just everywhere in terms of the design of the vehicles,
in terms of the sort of like just the concept of Neo Tokyo and like, what does that look
like and how do the people there behave and everything else?
So, yeah, I think you can see its influence on like all sci-fi anime that came after it.
暴走族の登場
Okay, let's do today's word of the day.
What is today's word of the day?
Today's word of the day is 暴走族, which means motorcycle gang.
暴 means out of control, exploding, violent, right?
走 means speed, run, right?
Like speed in terms of like go faster than.
And 族 means gang or family or tribe.
So high speed violence gang is a 暴走族.
And these were, I like don't really know, when did 暴走族 start appearing in Japan?
I mean, obviously post World War II, but like when did the first 暴走族 show up?
Like, are they like a 70s thing or like only the 80s?
Around 1950 to 1960s.
In the post-war period, as motorcycles got imported to Japan, people started just like
riding them and like forming street gangs of people who rode motorcycles.
By the 1980s, they had like a real aesthetic of like tricked out bikes with like flags
and stuff behind them, often sort of like samurai style flags that are like hung off
the back of the bike or like on a stand on the back of the bike.
Like really fun, like horns, right?
Like sirens and like flashy outfits that are often sort of feel inspired by like traditional
Japanese like culture.
Anyway, so Kaneda is in a 暴走族 gang, right?
They ride their like souped up, tricked out motorcycles, some of which they've clearly
stolen from other people on the freeways at night.
And they like have like rumbles with like other motorcycle gangs like the clowns.
暴走族と日本文化
So 暴走族 is like a really fun term.
You can see them in GTO, especially in the first episode.
And there's probably a whole anime out there about 暴走族 that I've just never watched.
But they're like a cool aspect of Japanese culture.
I feel like they stopped being around as much after the bubble burst for some reason.
People didn't have enough money to like do that.
Can you guess how many 暴走族 groups there are in Japan?
900.
No, 144.
Oh, that's not that many.
OK.
In 2024.
Yeah, so there's not as many anymore, but they're a cool thing.
There's a great book called Speed Tribes, which I think is probably from the 90s.
That's like talks about 暴走族 as a cultural thing that I'm pretty sure I was supposed to
read in college and probably read at least a part of.
Anyway.
So yeah, Kaneda and all the like boys in 暴走族, their name is Capsule.
I think they're in English.
I think they're referred to as the Capsules and they go up against the Clowns.
Yeah, I finally watched it and it was cool that basically the director guessed the year
for Tokyo Olympic Games.
That part is kind of trippy.
Yeah, at the beginning it says 2019 and then Tokyo Olympic is about to start.
Yeah, it's the same as real life.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
And then like I guess it didn't happen in the anime because Tokyo was destroyed, the
stadium was destroyed.
Yeah, yeah.
Everything got blown up.
And it's kind of similar because it was the middle of COVID and they had to postpone.
I mean, I'm going to go ahead and say that COVID postponing the Olympics by a year is
not exactly the same thing as all of Tokyo getting blown up.
But it's true that in both cases, a disaster forced them to not do their original plan.
The economy, like they couldn't, you know, fill people.
They spent a lot of money prepping for the Olympics and then they lost it all because
people didn't show up.
Yeah.
Not because they have really strict regulations.
On COVID.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's true.
映画のテーマと解釈
Anyway, anything else you'd like to add before we end?
I just think, you know, it's a movie that you can really keep coming back to because
it's got so many different things going on.
And one of the things that I walked away from this viewing thinking about was just that
the movie resists a direct, simple, metaphorical interpretation.
Is it about nuclear power?
Yeah, it's definitely about nuclear power.
And like, is it about power generally and the idea that power corrupts?
Like, yes, that's definitely a theme in this.
It has lots of other stuff going on, though, right?
It's got some like stuff that really feels like an allusion to cancer.
It's got stuff that really feels like allusion to like government programs and sort of exploitation.
It's definitely got a lot of drug themes.
But it doesn't have like very clear good guys and bad guys.
Even the people who seem sort of good or bad originally turn out to be kind of nuanced.
AKIRAのテーマとキャラクター
And I think if anything, one of the movie's big themes is that almost anyone who gets
too close to power is eventually corrupted by it.
And one of the real other themes of like Kaneda and the sort of young people who are the protagonists,
if not necessarily the heroes of the story, is that one of the things that makes them heroic
or less bad than most of the other people in the story is that they attempt to accomplish
things themselves as opposed to trying to manipulate other people or control or seize
other forms of power.
And I think that's an interesting thing to take on.
And last, one of the biggest differences between the anime and the movie is the role of a character
known as Miyako.
Anime and the manga.
Anime and the manga.
Yeah, sorry.
Is in the manga.
She's like a really important character in the second half of the story.
Miyako is sort of in the anime as like the sort of cult leader who's like, everybody
praise Lord Akira and then like goes down like immediately.
It's the same character design, but it's a totally different character anyway.
So there's some interesting stuff about sort of like religion and where the anime movies
sort of description about power and like what is Akira is like super unsatisfying.
And like they're like 30 second philosophical discussion in the jail is just kind of like
what?
Why did you include this scene?
The description in the manga about what the power is and how it gets used and like how
you control it is like much better.
And it's like delivered in a series of dialogues between Miyako and Tetsuo and other characters.
So the actual like what is this psychic power and how does it work stuff is handled much
better in the manga.
And it's one of the things in the anime that I was like most disappointed in to be like,
well, what is this supposed to be a metaphor for?
And the answer is like, I don't know.
In the manga, it's better explained.
And for me, the very, very end is unsatisfying.
But I don't know that other people will feel that way.
So I definitely would encourage anyone who saw this anime when it came to America for
whom it was a formative thing to read the manga and get like a bigger picture of what
the story is about.
エピソードの締めくくり
Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode.
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See you next time for more 2AMOTAG.
Peace.
