The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Katsuhiro Otomo · a film · 1988 · about 124 minutes · animated · written with Izo Hashimoto from Otomo’s own manga · in Japanese
Mode
Animated apocalypse for adults; biker film, political thriller, body horror and cosmogony on one main line
Mythos
Apocalypse and rebirth; the sleeping god under the arena who is also the bomb; the overreacher who seizes the father’s power; the robot myth of postwar Japan answered by a child who is the weapon
Phase
A few days and nights in Neo-Tokyo in 2019, from a gang chase on the expressway to a second white light over the city, framed by the explosion of July 1988
Presentation
Animated feature in colour, about 124 minutes, the Japanese theatrical version of 1988, in Japanese; a city drawn as one environment, lit by night; music by Geinoh Yamashirogumi
Register
From schoolboy comedy and a bar brawl to the terror of a body swelling past the walls of a stadium; tail-lights, sirens, gamelan and chanted voices
Scale
Two orphans, one gang, one city built over a crater, and a universe made new
Governing Proposition
Thirty-one years after a white light destroyed Tokyo, a boy from a biker gang crashes into a strange child on the expressway, is taken by the army, and wakes to a power the state has kept in children since the catastrophe, until his body cannot hold it. The wager of the film is that a society which rebuilds over its catastrophe without reckoning with the cause prepares it again, and that drawn animation, made at a scale the medium had not been given, can carry an adult apocalypse in which the city and the body are one material that power deforms.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The first image is silent. Over Tokyo a white dome rises and spreads, and the city is gone. The date is July 1988, the month the film was released in Japan. The explosion begins a third world war, and the film cuts to Neo-Tokyo thirty-one years on, in 2019: a city rebuilt over the crater, dense, lit, rioting, raising an Olympic stadium.
The film opens on its own catastrophe and dates it to its own present. Everything that follows stands on that ground, and the ground is a crater the new city has built over without asking what made it. The film’s argument is set before any character appears: a society that rebuilds over its catastrophe, without reckoning with the cause, prepares it again.
Katsuhiro Otomo directed the film from a screenplay he wrote with Izo Hashimoto, from his own manga, serialised in Kodansha’s Young Magazine from 1982 and not finished until 1990, so that the film was made while its source was unfinished and ends on its own terms. It was produced by the Akira Committee, a consortium of publishing, broadcasting, toy and film companies, animated by Tokyo Movie Shinsha with many subcontracted studios, and released by Toho on 16 July 1988. Toshiharu Mizutani directed the art, Takashi Nakamura the animation; Katsuji Misawa photographed it, Takeshi Seyama cut it, and Shoji Yamashiro and his collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi wrote the music. The version judged is the Japanese theatrical release, about 124 minutes; there is one cut.
Movement II
At night a gang of boys on motorbikes, the Capsules, runs down the expressway against a rival gang, the Clowns. Kaneda, voiced by Mitsuo Iwata, leads them on a red bike, and its tail-lights are drawn as trails that hang in the air behind it. Tetsuo, voiced by Nozomu Sasaki, rides with him: the younger, the smaller, the one Kaneda has protected since they were children in the same orphanage. The chase is the film’s first height, and its geography holds at speed.
On a dark road Tetsuo’s headlight finds a small figure standing in front of him: a child with the face of an old man. Tetsuo crashes. The child is Takashi, one of the Espers the state keeps, children aged by what was done to them, numbered and held in a laboratory. The army seizes Tetsuo, under the Colonel, voiced by Taro Ishida, and Kaneda is left behind.
The rest of the film is the wound opened here. The protected boy is taken, and the power the state has kept in its children begins to wake in him. At the vocational school a teacher slaps the boys and Kaneda flirts; the city outside is a riot, a cult and a council. The film will join all of it to the one line, and some of it the film will drop.
Movement III
In the hospital and the laboratory Tetsuo is tested and dreams. In one dream the toys and the milk of a child’s room swarm his bed and grow over him, and he wakes screaming: power given to the boy who has been despised is first a nightmare of infancy. Kaneda, meanwhile, is drawn into a resistance cell through Kei, voiced by Mami Koyama, and its leader Ryu, while a councillor, Nezu, plays both sides, and Lady Miyako’s cult waits in the streets for Akira’s return.
The wound is pressed again and again: in a bar where Tetsuo is slapped, and in his killing of Yamagata. The power has become rage, and rage has a body. Tetsuo escapes. The Colonel stages a coup against the council to deal with him. Kei becomes a medium through whom the Espers speak. Much of this middle hour is opened and then dropped or closed in a line, and the film loses its own thread among factions.
What holds it is a name. Akira is number 28, the child the state has kept in its vault, and Kaneda and Tetsuo carry the names of the boy hero and his professor in Tetsujin 28-go, the robot story of postwar Japan. There the giant robot was a weapon a boy commands. Here the weapon is a child, and the bomb that destroyed Tokyo was him.
Movement IV
Tetsuo walks out of the hospital and across the city toward the Olympic stadium. Soldiers and tanks fire on him and fail; he breaks a bridge; he passes through the cult that waits for Akira. The army turns a satellite weapon on him, and its beam takes his arm. A new arm assembles from debris, and it assembles in the drawing as the city is assembled, so that city and body are one material.
Under the stadium is the vault, and in the vault, opened in the cold, are jars that hold Akira’s remains. The new city has built its arena over the cause of the old city’s end, and the state has kept that cause in jars. Tetsuo has come for the god under the arena and finds what is left of a child.
Kaneda comes after him. The march has joined everything the film opened, the state, its science, its cult and its crowd, in one sequence, and the film is strongest when it moves like this, on one line through the whole city. Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s score enters with Tetsuo’s power: percussion, gamelan and chanted voices, placed as event rather than accompaniment.
Movement V
Tetsuo loses his body. It swells past the edges of the stadium in a mass of flesh, cable and screaming infant forms, and swallows Kaori. He calls Kaneda’s name. The power that was given to the protected boy has filled him with a rage he cannot hold, and now his body cannot hold it either. The film shows this and does not state it, and it is the deepest thing the film knows.
Akira returns, and a second white sphere rises over Neo-Tokyo and eats the city as the first ate Tokyo. Inside the light the boys’ childhood is remembered, briefly and partly told: the orphanage, the smaller boy, the older one who protected him. The film’s own causes are dissolved in it rather than resolved, and the political plot, carefully laid, is not taken up again.
In the coda a voice says, “Boku wa Tetsuo”, “I am Tetsuo”, and a new universe is made. What Akira is, and what that universe means, the film gestures at and leaves. It ends where it began, in a white light over the city, and between the two it has shown a society that rebuilt over its catastrophe and made it again, and a boy who was given everything he lacked and could not hold it.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine resists the subtractive test: two orphans from the same institution, the protector and the protected, and a power that turns the weaker into a god and ends him. Every set piece presses on that one wound: the bar where Tetsuo is slapped, the hospital dream in which toys and milk swarm his bed, his killing of Yamagata, the stadium. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what lies around the spine. The film compresses a manga of six volumes into two hours, and the compression leaves surplus that is not required: the council and Nezu’s treachery, the resistance cell and Ryu, Lady Miyako’s cult, each opened and then dropped or closed in a line. Kei’s mediumship, through which the Espers speak, does work the film has not prepared, and the Colonel’s coup is staged and then abandoned at the climax. Necessary on its main line, assembled at its edges.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds. A society rebuilt over the crater of its catastrophe, without reckoning with what caused it, prepares the catastrophe again: Neo-Tokyo raises its Olympic stadium over the vault where the cause is kept in cold jars. The state and its science keep children as instruments and number them, and the Espers are aged children with the faces of the old. And power given to the boy who has been protected and despised all his life does not free him: it fills him with a rage he cannot hold, and his body cannot hold it either. That last is shown, not stated, in the flesh that swallows Kaori, and it is credited in full. What holds the axis below the gate: much of the film’s knowledge is atmosphere. The riots, the cult and the dread of the city at night are rendered as mood more than meaning, and the political argument the film opens it does not complete.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Elevation is frequent, and its register is dreadful. The silent white dome over Tokyo in the first shot; the chase down the expressway, the red tail-lights drawn as trails that hang in the air; Tetsuo’s walk out of the hospital through soldiers and tanks; the bridge he breaks, and the satellite beam that takes his arm; the stadium, where the jars are opened in the cold; the body that swells past the edges of the stadium in a mass of flesh, cable and screaming infant forms; and the white sphere that eats the city a second time. Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s score, of gamelan, percussion and chanted voices, lifts the end into something like a requiem. The film rises again and again across two hours, and the height at the close is real. Held below the top because the summits are mostly of terror and spectacle, and the tender heights, the boys’ childhood remembered inside the light, are brief and partly told.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The myth is partly built. Its frame is apocalypse and rebirth: the city destroyed, rebuilt over the cause, destroyed again, and a cosmos made new at the close. Akira is the sleeping god under the arena, worshipped by the cult and kept by the state, and he is the bomb: the absolute energy that destroyed Tokyo is a child. Tetsuo is the overreacher, Phaethon or Icarus, the youngest brother who seizes the father’s power; his metal arm and his swollen flesh are Frankenstein and the giant. Kaneda and Tetsuo carry the names of the boy hero and his professor in Tetsujin 28-go, and Akira is number 28, so the film answers the robot myth of postwar Japan with a child who is the weapon. That is built and bears load. Held two tenths below the gate because the cosmogony of the close is evoked rather than built: what Akira is, and what the new universe means, the film gestures at and leaves.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance: Japanese television and feature animation, Space Battleship Yamato, Gundam and Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984); the kaiju film, Godzilla above all, in which Tokyo is broken by the bomb’s offspring; Blade Runner (1982) and the cyberpunk city; and Otomo’s own manga, Domu and Akira, whose realism of line and architecture had changed Japanese comics. The turns are several and taken together: a feature-length animated film for adults, violent, political and apocalyptic, made at a scale of production animation had not been given; character motion as full as the best Western studio work; a city drawn in full detail as one environment and lit by night. The stake was large: a committee of investors, a first feature directed by a manga artist, from a story not yet finished. Held below the top because the genre materials, the bike gang, the dystopian city and the psychic child, were inherited.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. Drawn, the body can do what a live body cannot: Tetsuo’s arm assembles from debris, his flesh spreads through the stadium with the logic of a nightmare, and the metamorphosis is continuous with the line that draws the city, so that the city and the body are one material that power deforms. In 1988 no live-action film could have shown this, and the knowledge, that a body cannot hold the power it is given, belongs to the form. The drawn city also lets every surface be designed, so that the whole film is one made world. Held well below the top because the narrative form is the action film’s: chase, capture, escape, rampage, showdown. The compression of the manga lives in that form without being shaped by it, and the film’s structure could be told otherwise without loss.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Thirty-eight years of return are evidence. The film has sustained readings as an allegory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of the postwar economic city, of adolescence and male friendship, of the body and technology, of the state’s use of children; the coincidence of its Olympic stadium with the Tokyo games of 2020, postponed, has been read for years. Formally it yields on return: backgrounds full of signs, graffiti and lit windows, and motion studied frame by frame in the animation schools. What holds the figure: much of the return is technical or devotional, a study of how the film was made; the cryptic close invites interpretation more than it rewards it; and once the plot’s facts are known, who the Espers are and what Akira was, the mystery’s yield closes, as a mystery’s does.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1980s. Intrinsic force: the film showed that animation could carry adult apocalyptic cinema at the craft of the best live action, and reorganised what a feature animation could be outside Japan, where the medium had stood for children. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is very wide. Released in the United States by Streamline from 1989, it opened the market for Japanese animation abroad, and the adult anime features that followed, Ghost in the Shell (1995) among them, travelled on its path. Beyond animation it is taken up by makers: Chronicle (2012) takes its plot of a boy’s power and rage; Stranger Things (2016 onward) draws on it; and Kaneda’s sliding stop is quoted in films from animation to Nope (2022). Held below the top because its force reorganised one medium and its market more than what cinema as a whole could do.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty-eight years. The form is whole: the film as released survives in its one version, and the restorations, the 4K remaster of 2020 among them, are repair; the English dubs of 1989 and 2001 change a translation and the voices, not the work. Presence has been continuous and wide, wider than nearly any animated film of its decade: re-releases, television, every home format, IMAX screenings in 2020, and a place in visual reference far outside cinema. That would argue for more. Against it, the surface is partly of its making: the cyberpunk city and its biker gangs read as the 1980s imagining the future, and the film’s date of 2019 has passed. The drawn image ages less than the live-action effects of the same years. The bar is cleared by a tenth.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors shared across the arts, and the making is load-bearing through most of the film. Toshiharu Mizutani’s backgrounds make Neo-Tokyo a city of night light, with no frame left generic. Takashi Nakamura’s animation gives bodies weight and recoil, and the tail-light trails and the debris of each explosion are drawn as events, not effects. Mouths and faces act with the voices. Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s score is placed as event, the chanting and percussion entering with Tetsuo’s power, and Takeshi Seyama’s cutting of the chase and the stadium holds geography at speed. The charges fall on the writing, which is craft: the screenplay compresses its source into exposition, Kei, Ryu and the councillors speak as plot, and the middle hour loses its line among factions. Faces at rest are less individual than bodies in motion. The visual making stands with the best of the medium; the script does not.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the vocational school, Kaneda flirting and a teacher slapping the boys, and the cosmogony of the close. One law nearly governs both: power, whether of the gang, the teacher, the state or Akira, exceeds the vessel that holds it, and those who hold it are boys. The comedy of the school and the terror of the stadium obey that law, and the range is very wide, from a bar brawl to a new universe. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is the strain. The rules of the Espers’ power are never stated, so that what they can do changes with the scene’s need; the political plot, carefully laid, is abandoned when the metaphysics arrives; and the close passes from the physics of the drawn city to a light in which the film’s own causes are dissolved rather than resolved. One law, held under strain at its edges.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 124 minutes holds, and it holds many orders. The state, in a council, a colonel, a coup, the police and the riot. Science, in the laboratory, its numbered children and the satellite weapon. The sacred, in Lady Miyako’s cult, the crowds waiting for Akira’s return and the god in the vault. History, in the war and the first explosion, and the city rebuilt over it. The natural order, in the energy that unmakes matter. Youth, in the gang, the school and the orphanage. Consciousness, Tetsuo’s, in dreams and memories, from inside. They are integrated where Tetsuo’s march joins state, science and cult in one sequence. What holds the axis at its figure: they are joined by spectacle more than by understanding; labour is absent, and the city has no work; the family is absent but for the orphanage remembered; Kaneda’s consciousness is surface; and Kei, Kaori and every woman are held as functions.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, then The Made at 8.8, then The Sublime at 8.7. A film that showed animation could carry adult apocalyptic cinema and opened the market for Japanese animation abroad; a drawn city of night light and bodies with weight and recoil; and an elevation of dread that rises across two hours to a second white light over the city.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.8: the main line from the crash to the stadium is necessary, but the council, the resistance, the cult and the coup are opened and dropped as the compression of the manga leaves its surplus. Above it, The Inner Law and The Encompassed at 8.0, where the Espers’ power has no stated rules, the political plot is abandoned when the metaphysics arrives, and many orders are joined by spectacle more than understanding.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 falls two tenths short and The Unconcealment at 8.2 three tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.4 from a sum of 100.4, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Akira as released in Japan by Toho on 16 July 1988, the Japanese theatrical version of about 124 minutes, in Japanese, from the white dome over Tokyo to the closing light: directed by Katsuhiro Otomo from a screenplay by Otomo and Izo Hashimoto, after Otomo’s manga serialised in Kodansha’s Young Magazine from 1982 to 1990; produced by the Akira Committee; animated by Tokyo Movie Shinsha with many subcontracted studios; photographed by Katsuji Misawa, edited by Takeshi Seyama, with animation direction by Takashi Nakamura, art direction by Toshiharu Mizutani, and music by Shoji Yamashiro and Geinoh Yamashirogumi; with the voices of Mitsuo Iwata, Nozomu Sasaki, Mami Koyama and Taro Ishida. There is one cut. The English dubs of 1989 (Streamline) and 2001 (Pioneer) change the translation and the voices, not the picture, and are not judged; the later restorations, the 4K remaster of 2020 among them, are repair and bear on The Imperishable only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Japanese film, and English renderings are the desk’s own. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and one line of three words is quoted. The fine detail of the subplots, the council’s factions and the order of some middle scenes, is held less surely and is described only in outline. Figures that could not be verified, among them the budget, the number of drawings and colours, the method of recording the dialogue, the date of the British release, the dialogue share and the shot and scene counts, are not given.