Midweek Mention... Akira

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hello.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Hi. How are you guys? I'm very well, actually, Chris, because I've just watched an amazing game of football. Okay. Football Cape Verde have just drawn Thrush Spain nil-nil. Thrush Spain nil-nil. What a spectacle. It is. I mean, we're going to talk about films, but I'd imagine over the next month or so a little bit of football chat might sneak into it.

SPEAKER_02 0:36

Bleed into the pod. It may do. I think next week the plan is to record on the night of the England game. That's right. And Peter's going to be here. Oh no. And he's picked some England-centric films in the films for us to week. Escape to Victory and not all. I know what they are, so I can I can only know the answer. But this right here has nothing to do with football week. No. There's very little ball content in Akira. No. Sort of glowing orbs and spheres and stuff. Some of that.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Is this kind of inspired by our motorcycle week it's going to follow?

SPEAKER_02 1:09

Because I hadn't seen this before, but I was still aware of the motorcycle in it and that sequence where he The Akira slide.

SPEAKER_03 1:16

It's been I watched a three and a half minute video of all of it being referenced multiple times across animation and Which is where he slides sort of to the side on the bridge. Yeah, on the motorway. It's about three or four minutes into the movie, right? The Akira side, it's pretty early on. But yeah, it's the one of the most famous shots in animation. And like a lot of this film, parts of its aesthetic and parts of its plot have bled into popular culture or influenced popular culture in so many different ways.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Because it was made in 1908?

SPEAKER_03 1:46

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or eighty. Around then. 1988.

SPEAKER_02 1:50

Kapsahiro Otomo.

SPEAKER_03 1:52

Yeah, and from an original manga series that what came out in 1982, which I haven't read or any of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

No. I haven't. This was new to me, although when I started to watch it, I realised I had seen certain parts of it before, again, probably just referenced in popular culture, which I'm all over.

SPEAKER_02 2:13

Yeah. No into that. Yeah. I didn't know anything about it really, but I don't watch a lot of manga. No. And this is probably the first real manga-y thing that we've watched for the pod. Yeah. I would say.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

We've done definitely. Have you ever heard of Crunchyroll? No. That's a good idea. That's a whole channel dedicated to and my daughter watches it all the time. She's really into it, and I think she got it a little bit from her brother. But yeah, Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll, it's like the the program the channel. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:53

So this it starts off with a shot of Tokyo.

SPEAKER_03 2:56

Yeah. Complete silence and then like handing out long.

SPEAKER_02 2:59

Then something goes off and it's destroyed.

SPEAKER_03 3:02

Well, yeah. It starts like a black thing at the centre of it and it just sort of subsumes everything.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

I thought it was quite useful for my viewing anyway to have read a little bit about the premise of the film before. So because it's not Tokyo as as you know it. There's been a big kind of war and and so it's futuristic kind of Tokyo rather than what you'd expect to see if you were just saying, Oh, it's Tokyo. So it has this different kind of vibe around it, and that then gives you an idea of these kind of biker gangs and everything that going in and out, because it kind of starts with that, doesn't it? A big chase.

SPEAKER_03 3:47

Yeah, well, we get the cold opening of the the sort of explosion of Tokyo, and then we get the cut to Neo-Tokyo, don't we? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:55

Does it say how long it's passed? I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 3:57

It's tw it puts the time at the futuristic year of 2019. And it's new to Neo-Tokyo is built on reclaimed land of that what was destroyed of the old Tokyo. And there's just a load of stuff up front establishing the plot. There's like there's like riots going on because of tax and stuff like that. And what else is going on? There's unemployment, there's all sorts.

SPEAKER_02 4:26

Gang warfare because we've got the the bikers, which is social closing a little bit like the Warriors, because you've got these gangs and a little bit of clockwork orangey with its young kids who are in these gangs. The capsules, they're they're called. He's got a capsule on his back. It's it's sort of get up, although it's a different colour. It might be a little bit of Drive, you know, he's got that famous bomber jacket with the he's got a scorpion on it, I think. He's got the capsule logo on the back.

SPEAKER_03 4:49

That's Tetsuo, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 4:50

And that's his Canada with the it was it him who had the jacket on.

SPEAKER_03 4:54

Canada had the jacket, and Tetsuo is also a part of the capsule gang, and you see them racing these fucking crazy like Calgolo clown bikers through the city, which is when we get the Akira slide quite early on.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

And well, at one point he falls off his bike, then he gets to get back on the car. Fuck. Yeah. Because this was quite difficult to find online. There wasn't a wealth of places offering this, so I had to find it in the depths of the internet. And the first place I looked had it in Japanese, and my Japanese is pretty good, obviously. Well, you've been there, yeah. So I've learned it that sex hotel, right? You learn a lot in a sex hotel. And yeah, I've been there, you know, for nearly two weeks, so I picked up quite a lot, obviously. But just yeah, but that was I got rid of it a lot. I went to doctors and got rid of a lot of what I picked up. Yeah. But I was maybe maybe missed out a bit of the nuance. Possibly. So then I found um uh an English version. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 5:54

Oh well, dubbed. I went with subtitles.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

Yeah, I went with subtitles, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 5:58

No, I I've I've got it dubbed. The dub is supposed to be quite good, actually. So I don't know. Dub seen.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

I think for animation it's probably the the only time it actually works because you can't really it doesn't go over the lip reading or you you know it's yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:11

Sometimes with the Ghibli ones, they use like really famous voice actors to do it, and it takes me out of the thing a little bit. But with this, I just went Japanese. In fact, where I was watching it, I don't think there was an option to dub. Right, okay.

SPEAKER_01 6:24

Yeah, I would have preferred subtitles to be honest, because then it could have just improved my job.

SPEAKER_02 6:27

And then I try to try to piece together what word might mean what and almost pick out their names sometimes, but that's about it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:34

So anyway, we have this big battle through the streets and explosions and falling over and all this stuff. And then Texua crashes because there's like this weird green-skinned kid kind of turns up in the middle of the battle. They're gonna be these kind of like pre-cogs. A bit like my Espers or something they call them on the wiki page, but I don't think they call them that in the city. No, it wasn't the test subjects, they've got numbers under him, but they're basically like well, minority.

SPEAKER_02 7:02

Well, we see a guy leading Yeah, but you see a guy leading this one through the street, he's being pursued, and they don't immediately reveal what this thing is. Yeah. So you see a hand that maybe looks a funny colour or something, and you're like, what's going on there? And very short. Yeah. And eventually he's cornered and gunned down, and he tells can't remember the the pre-cog's name, but yeah, he's it's it's Takashi, number twenty-six. Go and find Ryu. Yeah. Not Street Fighter Ryu. No, different Ryu.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Yeah, he's saying he's run, run, and he just gets absolutely mowed down by the by the cops. Yeah. And then he just turns around and screams, and with this scream comes like destruction of all the glass buildings around. There's a big huge keg that comes tumbling down from a building and people probably would have killed hundreds, hundreds of people.

SPEAKER_02 7:53

Could have done it easily. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:54

And and and it's probably a good point to just quickly pause to talk about the animation style, because there is a lot of destruction. It's like blisteringly kinetic. Like the camera is always moving, and because it's animated, it it can do stuff that was in 1988, like the equivalent of what they do with a roving camera via CGI now, where stuff, you know, it comes through and it was obviously all painstakingly drawn out and every frame has some sort of movement or something interesting in it. Even when they're just looking at somebody still, you still see the wind moving their hair or their clothes or something like that. So it's really, really incredible to me.

SPEAKER_01 8:32

It's obviously animation, you know, but it you soon if you've got any hang-ups about watching cartoons or animation, you soon forget about this because of the way that they use the camera, because of the way that the speed of frames and everything, and it just becomes really absorbing to watch it quite quickly, I felt so within ten minutes. I was just like hooked into it. Really hooked into it into it. Because of the animation was so good it just it added to it rather than took anything away, you know, even though it's not obviously a lot of plot.

SPEAKER_03 9:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:09

And there's a hierarchy within the the capsules group. Canada is clearly the alpha.

SPEAKER_03 9:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:15

And Tetro is a bit disgruntled about that. And he's possibly the one that has to be helped.

SPEAKER_03 9:20

And yeah, exactly, because he'll talk about when they met him at school and he was kind of a bit bullied and a bit sort of.

SPEAKER_02 9:26

And Canada's also mentioned about his his special bike. It's the the red bike that we've all seen, and it's specially tricked out. You can only ride it in a certain way, it has to do blah blah blah. And at one point Tetsuro decides he's gonna nick it and joyride it. Yeah. And it's just like leads to his downfall, really, because he can't ride it. Yeah. I think it cuts out.

SPEAKER_03 9:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:45

And it ends up with him being apprehended.

SPEAKER_03 9:47

Yeah. Yeah, well, they they get apprehended and let go loads of times, right? Because before that, Colonel Shikishima, and we meet him, he they take them into the police and they come up with this ridiculous alibi and then they're let go, which is when they take her with them. He take K with them, which kind of becomes sort of a love interest for Canada or something. Never really becomes anything, but you could tell he's sweet or not. Well, he's just constantly sex pesting her, basically. I'm in the revolution, mate. I'm busy. Yeah. So is this when what's his chops? Tatsu gets taken in and he's scanned, and the doctor finds that he's like a real powerful.

SPEAKER_02 10:22

He's a good case for some sort of experimentation, perhaps. Yeah. I'm like, what the fuck is this?

SPEAKER_03 10:32

It's like a s the only thing of CGI in the whole movie.

SPEAKER_02 10:34

Like a 3D kind of hologram music thing that plays a thing. And he can he can interpret this to be some sort of measuring device, and he's like, wow, this thing's really.

SPEAKER_03 10:53

So going into it, I just thought that Akira would be the guy on the bike. I just turn up really until the end of the movie. No, no. But yeah, they start talking about him as the guy who was the first psychic, a really powerful psychic who was responsible for what happened in Tokyo and the subsequent, you know, coming to control of this sort of crazy military government. Because we get to see that a few times, like these ridiculous generals just arguing over, like esoterically over nothing while all this carnage is going on like in the streets and stuff.

SPEAKER_02 11:25

Yeah, I mean the city the city ends up well, it seems to be at the start, but then it just is constantly being like demolished. Like Godzilla's been through there a few times.

SPEAKER_03 11:33

But there's riots and stuff going on all the time as well. I mean, it's not a happy place.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

No, it doesn't look great. Um Nor did a school. Can you remember they were in the school? You know, if the this is they're just saying, Well, they just get lost chance. They get whacked, don't they?

SPEAKER_02 11:46

Each one of them, they just stand in line and get fucking hit by the fee teacher and then the headmaster. And the office looks quite prim, and as soon as you go outside, it's just graffiti and like destruction, vandalism everywhere. Yeah. That was really Cloric Orangy, I thought.

SPEAKER_03 11:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:58

Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_03 12:00

So try to skip through. I just want to talk about some of the better sequences, like when Tetsuo's in uh the hospital and well it turns out there's three sort of these precogs, isn't there?

SPEAKER_02 12:09

Yeah, there's the one that like Mr. X in his floating chair. Yeah. There's the girl who's in a this bubble. Yeah. She's the real precog one, and and she's can seemingly port herself in and take over other people. Yeah. And project herself through them. And then there's the one there's the one that we saw at the start who who can do this kind of mad telekinesis thing.

SPEAKER_03 12:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:30

And it's that sort of power that we start to see Tetsuro.

SPEAKER_03 12:34

He he's when he comes to after being taken his hospital, he like dr a glass of water just comes flying towards his hand, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_02 12:40

It's like the force, but way more destructive. Yeah. He's he keeps getting these headaches, and it's clear i they actually tell him, don't they? I think the girl, the little girl one says, you know, you're you you need to just chill. You can't use your powers. Full infantino, chill, relax. Yeah. Let your powers, let your powers, you know, you need to let them mature and and get to understand them. But he's He's straight away.

SPEAKER_03 13:01

He's crazily. He's it's it's too much for him. But also they're plaguing him with these nightmarish hallucinations, like when they suddenly the girl becomes a giant like monstrous teddy bear in the truck and that sort of thing. They're chasing him through the hall, like these horrible, and then when he comes to, because he's sort of half breaking out at this point now, there's all these like guys, soldiers with assault rifles and stuff. And he just obliterates them with horrible, like it's really graphic, yeah, bodies exploding and horrible injuries and all that sort of stuff. So yeah, it's it's the second act is kind of a bit of this happening a few times, going into hospital, breaking out, going back in, and then we find out that Kay, that we met earlier, is part of a revolution, and Canada kind of gets reluctantly drawn into it basically because he wants to fuck her. There's like a military coup. Yeah. There's a fucking lot of money. There's a lot of plot going on. But it's all going to come down to getting Akira, Lord Akira, back together, getting the get the band back together.

SPEAKER_02 14:02

He's been buried, they they tell him. They tell Tetsuo finds out through basically like crushing someone's brain. At the Olympic Stadium. But he's buried underneath the Olympic stadium.

SPEAKER_03 14:11

Where West Ham played. Yeah. So yeah, he was buried there in the futuristic year of 2019. Yeah, so he goes there and a lot more happens than than we're simplifying it to, but he eventually Because Tetsuo is convinced that if he can get Lord Akira's power or something, he can do some stuff. He's sort of losing the the plot completely at his hands.

SPEAKER_02 14:32

He doesn't really have a plan.

SPEAKER_03 14:33

No.

SPEAKER_02 14:33

He's just on a rampage. Yeah. He's been interfered with in, you know, ways he didn't ask for, and he doesn't he can't control it. And so he exhumes this enormous sphere, which I think was just a massive, massive what's it called when you freeze yourself? Cryogenic. Cryogenic thing. And you think it's gonna be a kira, or because someone at some one point says there's no such thing as a kira. Yeah. So you're a bit like, oh maybe it's not a myth. What is it? And they eventually it's a fucking gigantic thing, which when they eventually cracks it down into the middle, it's it's parts of samples that have been And then that's when Shikishima turns up again.

SPEAKER_03 15:15

He's now he's turned away the coup, hasn't he? He's his own men have like fought back against the government who've tried to replace it.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:21

And he's there and he's just like, yeah, we experimented on him until there's basically nothing left. And you look and it's just like capillaries and brilliant slices of the city.

SPEAKER_02 15:28

Like his optic nerve, yeah. Like a a slice of his brain. Yeah. But there's probably about twenty or so jars that we see of various different or more, I think. But they are just literal, you know, like on a peach, you know, on a slide and stuff like that. There's nothing left of him. But this is while while this is going on, Tetsua's powers have become all-consuming, really. And unstable. Yeah. He he's had his lost an arm in a they use this satellite-based what is it called Sol? Yeah. Sol 747 to basically laser him from space, which is what causes him to lose an arm. The first blast does. So he is able to telekinetically bring these metal and chips and whatever to create a sort of prosthetic arm.

SPEAKER_03 16:14

Very reminiscent of Superman 2 or whatever, with for the women in the thing. His arm sort of grows like robotically. But pretty soon. It doesn't last long before that goes completely to it.

SPEAKER_02 16:24

So he sits in a sort of makeshift chair while the general's there. Yeah. And you can see it, it's just actually growing into the chair and just taking over everything. So he's clearly losing control completely.

SPEAKER_03 16:35

Well, basically, over the next sort of five or ten minutes, he'll turn into an abomination, a grotesque lump of flesh and screaming agony and extra eyes and toes and stuff as Canada turns up on the bike firing this experimental thing that he's got at the But there'd been this girl who was obviously close to Tetsua and she's been following him.

SPEAKER_02 16:56

She keeps seeing news about him and follows him. And at the end of it, she gets consumed by this thing. Yeah. And just squashed.

SPEAKER_03 17:02

And you see her just get completely pressed against the glass and just like pr explodes basically bursts. So yeah, it's a nice sequence that.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

The the the what do you call them? The ESPers, they're ESP things. They can is because they can read your mind. And it because it I mean, we saw a couple of times where they're, you know, they are they're telepathically kind of communicating with with people, aren't they?

SPEAKER_03 17:24

Yeah, she manipulates Kai and the other one to help get them through the warehouse and all that.

SPEAKER_02 17:29

They say that they they will have to enact their plan when his powers are at their most extreme. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:36

And so they And they're gonna fall like Voltron and they're gonna go like three at a time.

SPEAKER_02 17:42

Well, they one of them just destroys or smashes all the vials of what's left of Akira, which creates then a kind of force ghost of He sort of dot Manhattan's himself from Watchmen back together, kind of winding flash of light, like all of the capillaries and stuff reassemble and suddenly he's there. Naked, I think. Yeah, I think you're right. And they he he go he then I I guess it's a kind of singularity that he creates. Yeah. That consumes everything, including Canada.

SPEAKER_03 18:14

Yeah. In the Wikipedia thing it says, oh Canada like sacrifices himself. You're like, no, he doesn't. He got fucking dragged in by Tetsuo, it's horrible screaming.

SPEAKER_02 18:24

And they the Esps Espers, whatever they're called, they say that, well, we can't survive it, but we can go in and fight against this or work, you know, with him, whatever, they don't really you don't really know what they do, three the hard way. Yeah. And we should be able to save Canada. Yeah. Which they do.

SPEAKER_03 18:42

And it they all end up in the singularity, and he basically experiences loads of passages of Tetsu's.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

When he goes to 2001 here. Yeah. You do see it was like when they first met, and so Tetsua's been like, You've always had to help me, and I'm tired of it, blah blah blah. I'm gonna be the boy. And you see that he he had been bullied on his first day of school, but so had Canada. Yeah. And he was actually pretty decent to him. He gave him his toy back when they were at school, and you're like, well, actually, you're being a bit of a prick, actually. Yeah. And we see various other bits and it kind of ends in a strange way.

SPEAKER_03 19:17

Well, they're sort of all ejected out, aren't they? But is this still Neo-Tokyo? I don't know. Well, it's I don't know. I mean, at the end it kind of zooms in again on another singularity in Tetsu. And it goes with his voice Tetsuro. Yeah. Maybe he's become godlike and started his own universe. That's what I thought.

SPEAKER_02 19:35

He was like some sort of deity now.

SPEAKER_03 19:37

Watchmen again type vibe.

SPEAKER_02 19:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:40

I don't know what was going on back in Neo-Tokyo because obviously there'd been a horrendous amount of destruction. I think Shikishimo is gonna be okay, Colonel Shikishimo is gonna be fine, isn't he, and all that, but um the animation of Tetsu when he's gone full mutant is like pretty incredible.

SPEAKER_02 19:57

It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:58

Yeah. I thought the animation in general was outstanding. This is a pretty wild movie, if you like, but I d probably for manga it's supposed to be fairly vanilla.

SPEAKER_02 20:07

That's probably saying exactly right.

SPEAKER_01 20:08

Like they've taken it on to like the nth degree subsequent to this, because you know I think that's why I enjoyed this one more than I've seen some others, because yes, it is plot heavy and it has all these kind of areas where I had to as I say I I I read what was going on with it because there was lots of th but I was still enjoying the the different I suppose cultural viewpoints and and the way that they they kind of go about making these films and also the fact that it just had seem to have loads of stuff that you think that's been influenced by, you know, like and loads of you could literally reel up like the matrix clearly heavily influenced by this, you know. To be influenced by a cartoon, like you know, uh an anime, and it is as you say, really kind of clear that even even as you said, you know, the Wyoming Gosling character and things like that, just the way that some of the characters stand and ride the bikes and go around and and some of the ideas of what would happen in the future. And I I just thought it was really interesting.

SPEAKER_03 21:13

And some prophetic stuff as well. There was graffiti about because obviously it is set at the Olympic Stadium and it says cancel the apparently the Japanese graffiti says cancel the Olympics 2020. Of course, they were cancelled the Japanese Olympics to 2021, right? The weird, nice little prophetic thing there. So this was really decent. I loved it, I really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_02 21:35

Yeah, I had a great time watching this.

SPEAKER_03 21:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:37

Yeah. Yeah, I would it's a good gateway, I think, if you if this anime was something that we were thinking about, this would be a good one to start for. I think so, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:44

Yeah, I think it is. It's a good it's a good starter. I think some of the more really out there stuff would not be familiar. I don't know whether my door is. But I like the the anime here as well. It wasn't quite dog tanning, but it seemed to have like quite a it wasn't quite dog tanning, though. It was it it seemed to have softer edges, like you know, I I don't know, I just enjoyed the uh that that side of it, which I don't always on on these films, but I think it's a lot of people.

SPEAKER_03 22:21

I think there's a good thing about like the thing about although obviously animation techniques do advance and change and all that stuff, you're not limited via imagination technically to do stuff in the same ways that you would have been in 1988 with a camera. So it's so that influence in it, that's oh yeah, you can see why a lot of filmmakers paid homage to this movie.

SPEAKER_00 22:44

Yeah, very cool.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

Chris, did you get round to seeing any of that?

SPEAKER_00 22:47

No, I I said side earlier, I couldn't find it on my usual channels, and I my laptop doesn't work anymore, so I couldn't stream it and I wasn't gonna watch it on my phone.

SPEAKER_01 22:57

No, it's not a phone.

SPEAKER_00 22:59

It was just defeat the purpose. So it sounds really interesting. It sounds complicated though. It's complicated. They do like lots of things. You kind of need to be talking about it.

SPEAKER_03 23:09

But I don't you could just enjoy it as a big Persian movie and enjoy the the animation and not necessarily hang to I don't necessarily hate animation.

SPEAKER_00 23:18

I really love the Latvian. I just say more on the sci-fi side, because you're not really in sci-fi. Right. I really love the Latvian thing that we did with the cat. That was really good. The red turtle, I really love. So there's a few that I really like. I don't Hotel Transylvania, again, it there's few of them that sounds good though.

SPEAKER_02 23:38

There's this other thing that Pete goes on about, and it's called Tetsuo. And he's a dude who like has a scar or a scab and he picks it and underneath it's metal. Alright. And he becomes just more and more metal as the thing goes on. And that sounds like it must have come from this, because the guy's called Tetsuo and he has he comes up with a metal arm. That's how it really fucking twisted.

SPEAKER_00 23:58

That might be the series, no, if you say that that's it could be, yeah. You said it was based on a series, no?

SPEAKER_03 24:03

Uh well, a a comic.

SPEAKER_00 24:04

Oh, sorry, comic, sorry. Sorry.

SPEAKER_02 24:06

But but I really enjoyed this. It's a strong recommended for me. Yeah. Strong. Yeah.