June 15, 2003
Akira
This thing is over three hours long which is more time than I can generally spend concentrating on a movie. I watched it in 2 or three sittings, and with the scattered plotting, that worked okay. This is the movie version of Otomo's epic manga that I finished a couple of months ago. They made major changes to the story to fit it into three hours. But enough about the plot which isn't what this thing is about. What it's about is killer visuals, and they are here. The animation and artwork are beautiful. And when you dip into the huge volume of extra stuff on the DVD and find out that this movie is all hand drawn, your brain explodes with trying to imagine the amount of effort that went into this thing. The music is pretty cool too.
Verdict: 2 stars (out of 4)
Posted by jeffy at June 15, 2003 08:40 PMAhh, too bad you didn't enjoy it very much. Akira is one of my favorite anime films.
Posted by: tyd at June 25, 2003 09:56 PMYou know, I'm not sure where that 2-star rating came from. I enjoyed it far more than that implies.
I haven't seen that much anime and I suspect that I'd like Akira better on repeat viewings. In some ways it was harder having read the book first since I had expectations of the plot and characters, and my most recent memories of the story were from the last couple of volumes which hardly made it into the film at all.
Posted by: Jeff Youngstrom at June 26, 2003 01:29 PM