Akira

Akira, the animated science-fiction film produced by MBS, Sumitomo Corporation, and Toho, arrives in theaters on June 10, 1988. It is a Japanese-language production, and it enters release carrying the kind of source material—Katsuhiko Otomo's serialized manga of the same name—that had already cultivated a readership before a single frame of the film was screened. What the film promises, on the basis of what is known about it, is a story set in a place called Neo-Tokyo, where a covert military project goes badly wrong and a member of a motorcycle gang is transformed into something the city cannot contain: a psychic force of enormous and destabilizing power. Two teenagers and a band of psychics become the counterweight to that force. Whether they are adequate to it is, of course, the question the film will answer. Read more…