Akira
Damn radical. Part of the holy trinity of classical anime: this, Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Cowboy Bebop.
Nominally “adult”, can be seen as childish with a superficial analysis. Even thought it was literally designed by a committee, it still preserves poignant themes and soliloquies about life, the universe, everything. There’s a bleak atmosphere that crosses through all characters and situations.
Whenever there’s a chance for something good to happen, reality ensues and everyone gets put in its place, a mere human dealing with forces beyond our control. While in Godzilla people are in awe at the force of the atom, here there is an acceptance towards those phenomena, similar to natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes.
It has way more fades to black than I remembered.
Visually, it’s hard to be more detailed than this without getting into fully computerised visuals. This only has minor bits of computer generated images.
It’s almost hyper-realistic. Some shots could stand side by side with live-action images and it wouldn’t be easy to tell them apart.
IMHO, it remains the pinnacle of hand-drawn animation if you consider the technical aspects alone. The last of the interceptors…
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.