McCarty. Akira, the Hippie

Akira is many, many things. It is cinematically gorgeous, symbolically rich, and perhaps most of all, it is extremely relevant. The messages Akira conveys about government corruption, social injustice, the abuse of power, adolescent rebellion, and the alienation of mankind and nature are themes which are essentially timeless. Perhaps not timeless, but particularly relevant to our post-modern society.
When watching Akira (though it was made in the eighties and set in the two-thousands) I found myself often relating it to the events and general sentiments of the 1960s in America, hence the song I used to introduce the blog. Thinking of this decade in our history, it's hard to not immediately conjure up black and white images of students placing flowers into gun barrels, running from tear gas, or yelling over the body of a friend who was murdered by government law enforcement. Images akin to these make up a large portion of Akira; I recall hearing about a clash between student protesters and soldiers hardly minutes into the film.

Just as the young adults of the sixties grew up in the shadow of the second world war, Akira's youth are shaped by the events of the third world war. This is really something which makes the film's use of extreme examples seem...not so unlikely.

If it's not gritty images of protest that spring to mind when you think of the sixties, then it's likely the counter-culture movement. Long hair, drug abuse, avant-garde music, avant-garde everything. This was an entire generation's rebellion against the stagnant social order that brought the world into its current, deplorable state. In Akira we see the same thing: adolescents who express themselves through radical behavior. They fully embrace their alienation from society, existing only as they please rather than however anyone else would have them behave. They are outcasts, but they are true to themselves.
As they are the minority in this society, they highly value camaraderie and find comfort in each other; the biker gangs are very close-knit and their friendships extend beyond all things. Consider how as Akira's aura begins to envelop Neo-Tokyo, Kaneda and Tetsuo reach out to each other, Kaneda forgoing safety in an obviously hopeless attempt to save his friend. Or consider how even when Tetsuo steals his bike, Kaneda's first concern is his friend's safety. These 'delinquents' are compassionate in a way the rest of society doesn't even know.

I really wish I had the attention span to write a fully comprehensive work on the parallelism between this two subjects, because they're just so rife with similarities and cultural commentary and it's all just absolutely fascinating to think about. Something else I really wanted to get into, but will save for another film, is the use of sound and music. Cowboy Bebop and Fooly Cooly -which are defined by their soundtracks as much as their narratives- are two of my favorite series. Akira's mix of minimalism and tribal sounding tracks is just thematically and theatrically awesome. It's really cool music, though it really doesn't have the same gravity out of the context of the film: