Akira capsule originally written for a never published piece on body horror.
Adapting from his own 1982 manga of the same name, Katsuhiro Otomo sets his cyberpunk anime in a dystopian Neo Tokyo of 2019. The same primordial force, described by one scientist as “the power of God”, that reduced Tokyo to ashes 31 years earlier has now reawoken within Tetsuo Shima, a member of a teen biker gang. As this downtrodden, marginalised and bitterly resentful high-schooler finds himself newly empowered, and lashes out angrily against everyone and everything, the changes to his body become a monstrous representation of troubled adolescence.
The film’s climax shows Tetsuo completely losing control of his own rapidly growing and mutating physical form (all bulging sinew, circuitry and teeth) in a manner that only animation could present on such a metropolitan scale. This all-engulfing metamorphosis represents not only Tetsuo’s own recalcitrant, destructive impulses, but also those of an entire city filled with political unrest, riots, gang wars and apocalyptic cults. As the dizzying, city-wide quality of the CEL animation pulsates, convulses and bursts on the screen, this is body horror as the spirit of explosive unrule.
strap: Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga-based dystopian anime merges a young man’s unstable adolescence with a city-wide apocalypse
Anton Bitel
