Akira: A Strange Disappointment

 

I can already hear your retorts of, 'But Akira is the perfect movie! It's a classic!', but hear me out.

Every medium and every genre has its classics; the works that everyone must see, or read, or perhaps smell. Akira is a classic of the cyberpunk genre and of the medium of animation. It is one of those works of visual art that is referenced in so many other works that experiencing it firsthand feels like unlocking some kind of secret code. Akira is a notable contribution not just to the visual design of the cyberpunk genre*, but arguably to the design conventions of the medium of film as a whole.

*Players of Cyberpunk 2077, itself a pastiche of the genre, will recognise Kaneda's bike (Jackie's bike) and the Harukiya Bar stairwell (Afterlife entrance) 

One would expect such a visually influential film to also be highly insightful. Watching this film for the first time today, I personally was expecting, at the very least, to find the plot elements quite familiar. Just as I saw in Akira the origin of various visual references and conventions, so too did I expect to learn the source of various storytelling references and conventions. Tragically, Akira comes up mightily short in this department.

My first instinct, upon watching the credits roll away into the darkness, was to consider what happened in the film. No, really; what actually happened in Akira? A boy developed psychic powers, he killed many people, and then he died, which apparently created a new universe. This is a fine story on its surface; were I to be given this basic plot summary before watching Akira, I might have guessed that it was a film about the opening of new doors after tragedy occurs.

What really makes a story isn't necessarily its plot. Rather, it's how the plot is presented to us. Ordinarily, this means writing characters to provide a lens through which to view the plot. This is why writing teachers (be they formal teachers or people who write about writing) will often advise that character makes a good story, not plot. 

Akira's story is not presented to us through a protagonist. There is no 'main character' in Akira. Yes, Kaneda is the fellow on the poster, but he is not the protagonist of this film. Nobody is. Akira does not have a protagonist; in fact, I'm not even confident that Akira has an antagonist. Colonel Shikishima and his squad of withered children are trying to prevent a nuclear explosion -- which ordinarily wouldn't rule them out as antagonists, but they're never really shown to do anything villanous. Yes, they do kidnap Tetsuo, but we never really spend enough time with him to care much about him, and he seems to escape captivity without much inconvenience on his part anyway. It's only towards the end of the film's rising action that we learn that Tetsuo actually hates his best friend (who we only really know is his best friend then and there, because the film tells us), which is apparently his motivation for becoming evil and killing everybody.

Without protagonists, nor antagonists, Akira is less of a story and more of a series of events presented without commentary through the medium of animation -- a fascinatingly postmodern approach to filmmaking, likely unintentionally so, but nevertheless a very boring approach. We are told that humans have untapped 'potential', but we are not told what that means. Tetsuo's explosion at the end of the film does create a new universe, but we are neither told nor shown why this is significant; is this universe a good place, free from the strife that hurt Tetsuo?; is it a bad place, perpetuating the cycle of pain? We are shown that Kaneda is sad to have lost his friend (which is the bare minimum for character interaction), but we have no idea how he has been changed by the events of the film. We don't even have much of an idea of how the city of Neo-Tokyo has been impacted by these events, either. Will the government continue to experiment on children? Will the revolutionaries, equipped with psychic powers, take the government down, ushering in a new era of happiness for the people? Will life get worse? -- is Akira a tragedy, then, trying to express the futility of grand narratives in combating the problems of the world? Akira the film gives us no such information, and Akira the manga, though structurally different, does not give us any such information, either.

Thinking about Akira, I cannot help but think also of the punk movement. The Sex Pistols was a group of young people who felt something, and expressed it without commentary on how their feelings might ever be resolved. They complained, and then they fucked off. Similarly, Akira presents us with a sick and decaying world. It shows us the destruction of people who never asked to be put into the situation that led to their destruction. And then, Akira abruptly ends. It fucks off. People so often focus on the cyber part of cyberpunk, but seldom the punk. Akira has nothing to say. What could be more punk than that?