Akira↗
In the early '90s I read Super Play, a Super Nintendo magazine whose staff were unusually well versed in Japanese culture and the parts of it that bled into gaming: anime, manga. Helen McCarthy’s reporting and Wil Overton’s artwork did a lot of the teaching. That’s how I came to the likes of Akira, Fist of the North Star and Golgo 13 fairly young, and how I knew something about what Akira was supposed to mean before I’d managed to see it.
When I finally got a VHS copy of Akira through a subscription offer, it didn’t change my life. I think I found it hard going. What I couldn’t place at that age was Japan’s post-war relationship with technology, and its recurring critique of the abuse of it: nuclear power and weapons, biotech, the running conclusion that humans make irresponsible stewards. As the only nation to have been hit with nuclear weapons, Japan is uniquely placed to warn against reckless use of dangerous things, and by now that warning has practically settled into its folklore. Like Godzilla before it, Akira is folklore of that kind, which is why it survives the specifics of its plot.
Thirty-odd years on, and that reading is obvious. I’ve caught the film once or twice in between, but only now do I see it whole. It’s more violent than I remembered, though I’m a father these days and softer on that sort of thing. The hand-drawn animation has aged into something remarkable, and a good deal more likeable than the computerised work that’s followed it.
The one place its influence never properly landed is the medium that introduced me to it. Akira never got the game adaptation it deserved: an apparently duff Famicom title that never left Japan, and a Super Famicom version I remember Super Play trailing as in-the-works, which came to nothing. The film shaped Cyberpunk 2077 and the genre around it instead. The magazine got me there; the games it covered never quite followed.
