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Tagline: Neo-Tokyo is about to E.X.P.L.O.D.E.

Plot Outline: A secret military project endangers Neo-Tokyo when it turns a biker gang member into a rampaging psionic psychopath that only two kids and a group of psionics can stop.

Plot Synopsis: Kaneda is a bike gang leader whose close friend Tetsuo gets involved in a government secret project known as Akira. On his way to save Tetsuo, Kaneda runs into a group of anti-government activists, greedy politicians, irresponsible scientists and a powerful military leader. The confrontation sparks off Tetsuo's supernatural power leading to bloody death, a coup attempt and the final battle in Tokyo Olympiad where Akira's secrets were buried 30 years ago.

Review: Artist-writer Katsuhiro Ôtomo 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 Kaneda--run with a biker gang, but trouble grows when Tetsuo start to resent the way Kaneda 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 supermonster. 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 shootouts (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.

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094625/
Rating: 7.7/10 (17,393 votes)
Japanese Theatrical Release Date: July 16, 1988
DVD Release Date: July 24, 2001

Specs:
Video: XviD (CVS build 2005.12.26) @ ~1467 kbps
Audio: AC3 2Ch 192 kbps
Resolution: 688 x 384
Aspect Ratio: 1.792 (43:24)
Framerate: 23.976 fps
Qf: 0.232
Runtime: 02:05:27.694
Language: Japanese
Subtitles: English

Standalone specific specs:
QPEL - No, GMC - No, BVOP - Yes, NVOP - Yes

I-VOPs: 2508 (1.39%)
P-VOPs: 76517 (42.39%)
B-VOPs: 101463 (56.22%)
S-VOPs: 0 (0.00%)
N-VOPs: 0 (0.00%)

Max consecutive B-VOPs:   4
    1 consec: 60.16%
    2 consec: 37.89%
    3 consec: 0.04%
    4 consec: 1.90%

Screenshots:




 (1.46 GB)
(27 KB)