A review of Akira:

I'm gonna be brutal here. I HATED Akira. And you know what? I think Akira is largely responsible for the bad rep anime has in the west, as well as for atrocious anime like Dragonball Z and other fighting focused hormone driven anime and the fanatacism that surrounds them.

How can I possibly say this? Akira was one of the first anime movies to make it big in the west. Enough so that it became well known, even outside the video community. Schoolkids talked about it, parents wondered what it was and movie critics praised/damned it. It's such a damn shame that anime's first ambassador was such a load of crap!

Akira is violent, pointless, violent, gory, violent, confusing, violent and downrignt weird! How many other movies do you know where the 'hero' of the story is haunted by a teddybear and a tonka car, is obsessed with finding a brain in a jar and finally ends up becoming a gigantic mountain of flesh, goo, tentacles and god knows what else! Not to mention killing his girlfriend by surrounding and squiching her in his own bulk with a distastefull spurt of blood...

Gang violence, heavy weapons abuse, psychic geriatric 8 year olds, a stereotypical mad scientist (complete with white hair, crazy look and a lab coat)... The list of absurdities goes on and on. The plot is vapor thin, the characters are more two dimentional than a daytime soap, the action carries the violence, not the story.

Does this movie have ANY redeeming features? Ummmmm.... Well the artwork's pretty good in some places, especially the city scapes. But if that's all you want, go get Ghost in the Shell!

This movie is nothing more than a gore fest wraped up in a thin plot of teen angst and paranormal forces. Pure formula designed to excite the hormone overdosed teen male, and horrify his parents.

Yes, if not for Akira we would be seeing much more anime in the west, and parents wouldn't think that it's all violence and gore. Well maybe that's an exaggeration, but I don't think the damage that the abomination that is Akira has caused can be underestimated.