Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15130 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-06-23
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Number of discs: 2
• Formats: Box set, PAL
• Original language: English, French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 300 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Artist-writer Katsuhiro Omoto began telling the story of Akira as a comic book series in 1982 but took a break from 1986 to 1988 to write, direct, supervise and design this animated film version. Set in 2019, the film richly imagines the new metropolis of Neo-Tokyo, which is designed from huge buildings down to the smallest details of passing vehicles or police uniforms. Two disaffected orphan teenagers--slight, resentful Tetsuo and confident, breezy Kanada--run with a biker gang, but trouble grows when Tetsuo start to resent the way Kanada always has to rescue him. Meanwhile, a group of scientists, military men and politicians wonder what to do with a collection of withered children who possess enormous psychic powers, especially the mysterious, rarely seen Akira, whose awakening might well have caused the end of the old world. Tetsuo is visited by the children, who trigger the growth of psychic and physical powers that might make him a superman or a super-monster.

As befits a distillation of 1,318 pages of the story so far, Akira is overstuffed with character, incident and detail. However, it piles up astonishing set pieces: the chases and shoot-outs (amazingly kinetic, amazingly bloody) benefit from minute cartoon detail that extends to the surprised or shocked faces of the tiniest extra; the Tetsuo monster alternately looks like a billion-gallon scrotal sac or a Tex Avery mutation of the monster from The Quatermass Experiment; and the finale--which combines flashbacks to more innocent days with a destruction of Neo City and the creation of a new universe--is one of the most mind bending in all sci-fi cinema. --Kim Newman

On the DVD: as befits this film's status as a Manga classic, Akira has a wide selection of extras spread across two discs, including a "Making of Akira" documentary, a photo gallery, a quiz and a "Make your own trailer" feature, as well as one hidden feature on each disc. The film has been digitally remastered and presented in widescreen format, with Dolby Digital 5.1 for the English-dubbed version, and Dolby Digital 2.0 for the original Japanese language version. The only disappointment of the disc is the animated Scene Selection, where the clips are rendered so small that they can be a bit difficult to decipher. --Rob Burrow

DVD Description
It’s 2019, the world is on the brink of absolute destruction. Tokyo shimmers with tech-noir fetishism, gangs of cyber-punk bikers cruise the sprawl of the post-atomic city and rioting crowds surge under the neon-topped buildings looming a thousand storeys into the sky. Now, old gods return to do battle with Akira and something more than comic book ultra-violence is unleashed. Prepare to enter this astonishing nightmare of hyper-reality created by one of the world’s leading animation directors, Otomo Katsuhiro.

Special Features
Disc One:

• Digitally remastered feature
  
• 16:9 Anamorphic Widescreen
  
• English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound
  
• English Stereo 2.0
  
• Japanese Stereo 2.0
  
• English, Norwegian, Danish, Portugese, Finnish and Swedish subtitles
  
• Running Time: 130 mins approx.

Disc Two:

• Original feature
  
• 4.3 Full Screen
  
• English Stereo 2.0
  
• Production Report
  
• Manga Previews
  
• Running Time: 180 mins approx.

Customer Reviews

watching this is something you have 2 do!
not just the greatest manga of all time, but possibly the greatest animated feature of all time, its pure briliance is unrivalled by any cartoon ive ever seen, i never get bored of it, and its detailed characters and storylines, revealing every detail of neo tokyo and the characters disturbing pasts are handled and drawn brilliantly, this film is amazing so go watch it!

Disapointing
This film must have lost something in translation as it seems like an incoherent mess. I truly do not understand the apeal of this movie it is turgid and boring. While I am not the biggest anime fan in the world I do dabble but this was a waste of valuable time.
Avoid like the plague!

Up there with the greats of science-fiction cinema
Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira (1988) is a bold and vivid cyber-punk saga; wherein the story is a simple tale of good versus evil blown up to multi-layered proportions, further developed through the sublime, visually-transcendent animation and intricate character details, which both combine to create one of alternative cinema's greatest ever achievements. Everything you could hope to find in a science-fiction film is brought into play here, with warring street-punks, shadowy government conspiracies, psychological manipulation, body horror and nuclear holocaust all figuring heavily within the writhing and labyrinthine plot. It shows a continuation of the themes established in earlier classic of the sci-fi genre, most notably Fitz Lang's Metropolis (1927), Ishirô Honda's Godzilla (1954), LQ Jones' A Boy and His Dog (1975), Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), George Miller's The Road Warrior (1981) and Ridley Scott's iconic Blade Runner (1982), with the post apocalyptic theme and the further depiction of a technologically advanced, noir-like metropolis spiralling out of control.

Alongside this we have the ghosts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki referenced in the opening sequences, and the parallels of those atrocities revisited here as the trigger of World War Three. However, despite these more elaborate historical juxtapositions and themes of science fiction, the story's main focus is that of friendship; in this instance the friendship of two characters being pushed and strengthened throughout the film, finally reaching a climax with the final fight between Kaneda and the bizarre mutation of Tetsuo. This theme is central throughout Akira, posing serious questions of loyalty, contempt and ambition, as well as ending with the ambiguous idea that further battles must be fought before any of the characters (and by extension, the audience as well) know the truth about Tetsuo and the tree, mystical little children so central to the plot.

If you're already a fan of Manga and Anima, then Akira should be an absolute must see, that is, if you haven't experienced it already. However, please don't let a lack of interest in animation, or more appropriately, Japanese animation deter you from experiencing this film, as really, it is one of the most interesting, intelligent and accessible works of sci-fi cinema produced in the last twenty-five years. It is also incredibly influential, with its influence apparent in a number of subsequent great works of science fiction, including Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988), and sequel Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992), Rintaro's Metropolis (2001), Spielberg's A.I, (2001) and Minority Report (2002), Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive: Final (2002), Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 (2003) and Wong Kar-Wai's misunderstood masterpiece 2046 (2004). Already twenty-years on from its original release, Akira remains a bold, interesting and unforgettable work of vibrant, visceral, intelligent science fiction cinema that deserves to be experienced.