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Colonel Shikishima is one of the men in the front-line, an army officer who's come to oversee secret esp experiments. Government scientists have unlocked the portal to powerful mental skills, as shown by their subjects, but without control these powers are worse than useless. Thus, when Takashi goes missing, abducted by an infiltrator for terrorist purposes, Shikishima activates every force at his command on a rescue mission. At the same time, Kaneda and his friends are grappling with a contemporary gang, the Clowns. Finally gaining the upper hand, as the highway sweeps over desolation, Kaneda's buddy Tetsuo Shima gets engulfed in an explosion as he narrowly misses running down a funny-looking kid.
Suddenly the air is jostling with choppers and the ground lit up by what feels like a thousand searchlights. Shikishima has located Takashi and whisks him back to the lab along with injured Tetsuo. With their friend gone, Kaneda and his buddies return to their technical school, for delinquents. They're all worried about Tetsuo, though his waif-like girlfriend Kaori is the one who's really suffering. Unknown to them, Takashi has been returned to his playmates Kiyoko and Masaru while Tetsuo is undergoing some sort of painful treatment - perhaps to release dormant telekinetic powers. The final twist is that Kaneda has fallen for good-looking Kei, a hardened subversive who operates with Ryu. Soon, though, they'll all be connected by something bigger than the lot of them - the power that is Akira.
The most phenomenal aspect of Akira is the quality of its animation; it's smooth, crisp, dynamic and colourful. At all times the story moves on with pace, unhindered by the fact that it's all animated (in fact this aspect may have precisely the opposite effect). This wonderful fluidity conceals an incredible attention to detail and sub-surface complexity, the fruit of tremendous effort by the Akira team. An example of this is the way in which mouth movements accurately match the speech (if you're Japanese), an element commonly neglected in anime. If this isn't impressive enough, how about the intricate design of the jukebox in the Capsules' favourite haunt? It's only glimpsed for a moment but every detail was mulled over far in advance. However, these are minor considerations when placed against the deep, convincing and beautiful cityscape of neo-Tokyo.
Akira is also marked out by its characters, figures who actually move and interact in believable ways (until the telekinesis kicks in). Kaneda and the rest of his peer-group are just kids, misfits who have trouble fitting into society and enjoy flouting the law. They've got no particular interest in politics or the riots breaking out all over neo-Tokyo, at least not until Tetsuo is kidnapped. Then they come up against the Colonel, someone experienced enough to appreciate the big picture yet prone to underestimate the power with which his scientists are tampering.
Altogether, Akira is a marvellously gory post-apocalyptic tale, relating some unusual and powerful themes. Towards the end the film becomes needlessly obscure and tricky to follow, since it's never explained what Akira really is or where it came from. However, a tidy ending wouldn't have rung true - thus the result is a compromise. Apart from this flaw, Akira contains a high proportion of mind-blowing images and scenes, making it a truly intense experience. There's no doubt that Akira is ground-breaking work, the plus is that it's also entertaining, gripping and engrossing.
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