Episode 30: AKIRA (1988)

Content warning: Consistent stylized violence and one instance of attempted sexual assault. Katsuhiro Otomo’s film adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga, AKIRA, pits brother against brother as stand-in for the larger confrontation bubbling beneath the cracked asphalt of Neo-Tokyo’s bloody streets: a reckoning between the military, youth culture, masculinity, and nuclear anxieties with the shared trauma of old Tokyo’s annihilation. That thesis is complemented by florid, genre-benchmark animation and Shoji Yamashiro’s animalistic score, both of which put it – and long-form anime – on the international stage. "You Called for Me: Masculine Pain and Isolation in Akira" by Gretchen Felker-Martin: https://blog.vrv.co/felker-martin/2555/akira-boys/ Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters.