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I thought I knew what Akira was. I’d seen the clips, that bike slide, the gifs, the fan art. Everyone talks about it like it’s this holy thing from the past, and honestly, I figured it’d feel old or boring or like one of those movies you say you respect but don’t really care about. Then I watched it last night, full focus, just me and the screen. And yeah, now I get why people won’t shut up about it. That movie moves different. It feels huge, not because it’s loud or dramatic all the time, but because there’s something weirdly alive in every scene. Like it breathes.
No one warned me that the visuals would mess with my head like that. I found out after watching that they actually created about fifty new color tones for this film. Like, those colors didn’t even exist commercially in animation before Akira. They built them from scratch just to get that specific vibe. And you feel it. The city looks like it’s sweating neon. Everything is layered and glowing but also kind of rotting from the inside. It’s hard to describe. It doesn’t look futuristic in the way movies try to now, all sleek and minimalist. It’s chaotic. And what’s wild is that back in 1988, this was their version of the future. Now we’re in 2025, and we’ve ended up in this clean, quiet, beige reality. Even fast food logos are toned down. They thought we’d be living in chaos, and instead we’re stuck in safe mode.
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There’s something about the way the story unfolds that makes it feel personal, even though it’s obviously huge in scale. Tetsuo’s whole spiral didn’t feel like some big villain arc. It felt like watching someone break, and I mean that in a human way. He’s not evil, he’s scared. He’s desperate. The power stuff is just an amplifier for all the shit that’s already eating him up inside. Kaneda, Kei, the resistance—it’s all part of the noise surrounding that emotional center. The city’s crumbling, people are panicking, and there’s this big philosophical thing about control and identity and what happens when you don’t know who you are anymore. It doesn’t spoon-feed you answers. It just kind of throws you in and lets you feel it.
Also, I didn’t know they recorded all the voice acting and sound before animating anything. That blew my mind. Usually it’s the other way around, but here they did what’s called prescoring. And it works. Everything feels timed to emotion, not just movement. The screams, the silence, even that weird chanting soundtrack—it hits in your chest. You can tell they weren’t just making a movie. They were building something way more intense. It’s like watching a breakdown and a prophecy at the same time. There’s nothing sterile about it. It’s all guts.
Watching Akira in 2025 is kind of surreal. It’s this loud, messy, beautiful warning about a future that never showed up, but somehow still makes sense. It’s not about flying bikes or psychic kids, even though that’s what people always remember. It’s about what happens when systems fail and people get lost inside the mess. It’s about the kind of power that burns you from the inside out. And honestly, I walked away feeling kind of haunted. Not because the movie was scary, but because it looked at the future with such wild intensity, and we ended up here instead. Quiet. Flat. Predictable. Akira’s still out there screaming. We’re just not listening as loud anymore.
