Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/20/how-1988s-akira-predicted-th.html
…
8 Likes
The movie is fantastic, but what you want is the manga:
Also, Otomo is working on a new anime adaptation, 
16 Likes
First Anime to be broadcast on British TV. Late night Channel 4. Every boy (and a fair few girls if they would grudgingly admit it) stayed up to catch it. Mind. Blown. They then followed up with “Fist Of The North Star” & “Cyber City Oedo 808” soon after. But “Akira”… We all talked about the hand drawn rain…
8 Likes
So…they predicted more inequality…in a time when inequality was already a major issue.
And depicted protests…when similar protests had been going on all over the world for decades.
Other than the Tokyo olympics, where’s the 2020 vision? Is it the bike races? Very true, bikes are so popular it’s hard to find a bike at all these days.
Tetsuo loses control of his powers and expands into a disgusting blob of flesh
Ok so they did predict Trump I guess…
12 Likes
Slightly OT
Akira (alongside Evangelion) have always been odd ones to me.
They were my intro to anime at secondary school from a close friend…
And damnit they put me off anime for the next decade…
Eventually found my way back into anime years later and have watched a great deal since then, but i still greatly dislike those two most famous anime and i can’t really put a finger onto why exactly…
3 Likes
More importantly they were going on in neighboring South Korea. Those protests were pretty hairy affairs. All that was predicted was that Japan would adopt the same kind of riots.
1 Like
I love Akira personally. I think mostly just because of the music and the background dialog (stuff like a girl having a really private convo on a public payphone, or people complaining about getting their toes stepped on in a crowd shot “stop shoving” “hey, watch where you’re walking”)
I hated NGE because Shinji is the worst and sucks.
The only thing I like about NGE is the fight with Ramiel. For some reason seeing a mountain get stripped then a hole melted through it is always cool.
Ramiel: screams geometrically
7 Likes
I should probably try Akira again sometime. Retried Evangelion several years ago, ended up hating more than i did the first time…
Shinji is just so very, very annoying…
My personal favourite right now is Ascendance of a Bookworm - Wikipedia
Whilst the slightly overused isekai concept, this is enthralling me 
1 Like
I’m a Ghost in the Shell stan.
Especially the Stand Alone Complex TV series.
The Major awakened my love for physically dominant women lol.
7 Likes
Oh yes, it was this that initially rekindled my anime interest
have particular love for the tachikomas <3
6 Likes
Yes, Shinji is annoying. But I give him a pass because he is deeply, deeply fucked up, having been abandoned, abused or manipulated by pretty much every significant adult in his life. (Yes, Misato, that includes you.)
4 Likes
Oh definitely, it’s not Shinji’s fault he’s so fucked up and completely unlikable. But he definitely is completely unlikable.
3 Likes
He does blossom briefly in the warmth of Kaworu’s affection. Shame how that turns out, though.
2 Likes
Japan had hosted the Olympics at Sapporo in the 70’s. And IIRC the references to epidemics in the manga were drawn from an actual epidemic that hit Japan while the author was growing up.
Akira doesn’t really predict anything. It just really closely glosses the situation in Japan from the 60’s to the point where it was written. And the experience of Japanese folks born after the war and it’s immediate aftermath.
It’s more evidence that we’ve been repeating ourselves for a couple generations than a prediction of any sort. Along with a hell of a lot of similar works from the 80’s. A half century of kicking the can down the road is coming to a head. None of this was hard to predict at all.
6 Likes
.You don’t have to even go abroad. Protests against the Narita runway extensions were going on in 1982, the year the Akira manga was first publsihed.
Not too many years earlier in the 60a and 70s you had massive protests against building the airport itself, as well as some crazy hardcore student protests. A protest by the latter in Okinawa in 1971:
7 Likes
I love how the Tachikomas talk with their hands waving. Its so silly, but makes for interesting visuals.
9 Likes
Meant also to say – the metafictional reason he’s so unlikeable is that he’s a surrogate for the writer, who for many years seems to have despised himself the way people despise Shinji.
2 Likes
Cute little spider tanks.
“You know the Major gets mad when we chatter!”
8 Likes
And yet the SAC intros make them look so badass.
4 Likes
They are fully capable of badassery. Remember what they did to the Umi Bozu.
6 Likes
