The Reel Rejects - AKIRA (1988) IS A MASTERPIECE!! MOVIE REVIEW!! First Time Watching!

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Starting point is 00:01:22 Head to your nearest Chevron station to fuel up and get rewarded today. Terms apply. See Chevron, Texcores. for more details uh john any final thoughts before we get into akira nah man this is a roxy long intro let's do this day and he told me not to do it anyways akira commence well yet we just watched akira so if you have some tea in your hands and uh you feel like giving us a rating on Apple or Spotify, we'd appreciate it if you give us five stars. And if you want cool teas like these, rejagnation shop.com.

Starting point is 00:02:06 Yes. Janizio, what did you think of? Akira, did it live up to all your expectations? Absolutely did. This was quite an epic. This was a thick experience. And like, you know, knowing this was when this was produced, like, all the more impressive. it's definitely one of those movies

Starting point is 00:02:29 that feels like you know just a it feels more like a big you know multifaceted just living piece of art than just a movie not to degrade you know the concept of being a movie

Starting point is 00:02:42 but it just feels like it's it contains all of the magic of that but also like so much more it's yeah like I gotta put my brains back together because you know yeah this definitely obviously you know inspired so many things

Starting point is 00:02:56 but for sure but yeah this was uniquely sort of what i associate with anime is uh when it's like really hitting you have these really fascinating ruminations on you know the convergence between things like power be that military or some kind of fantastical sci-fi power and then like civil unrest and like the irony that comes with that and then you'll have like also just like human themes and and you know life happening among the characters and uh i thought this was like a fascinatingly handled piece because you know it's sort of like the situation at hand is sort of the main character almost and everybody it's like an ensemble piece you know everyone's dealing with

Starting point is 00:03:39 this and and you know you have this like ultimate power that everyone's trying to control and you know we're living through the the fallout of some you know kind of massive you know countrywide disaster that has obviously left, you know, the traumatic remains in its wake on both people as well as just the systems of society. Right. And, you know, having the convergence of things like science and all that with these more fantastical and, you know, oh, what is the word? It's like all that HR Geiger stuff is sort of categorized by like it's like biomechanical

Starting point is 00:04:17 flourishes and by the end it's almost this like spiritual you know crazy you know theoretical kind of experience or conclusion and it's hard to deliver on you know the payoff of something like an Akira like they keep building it up as a kid or a person is it a force is it just sort of some you know convergence of the divine and science you know and it's like hard to pay off a question like that and and you know you also have these supernatural

Starting point is 00:04:52 elements of play or these elements that feel supernatural supernatural by way of science like with the kids and stuff and like all that comes together into this yeah super fascinating piece that again has so many things attached to it because you're looking forward into a future 30 years down the line and i feel like in the 80s you would be what 30 years slightly removed time what's up Yeah, I feel like in the future you'd be, you know, or in the 80s, you're sort of 30, 30 odd years slightly removed from, you know, a similar event with World War II and, you know, the events of Hiroshima and Nakasaki, which I'm not sure, you know, if that's like totally what is partly being commented on here. But I got to imagine it's taking some of those sentiments of like the rebuilding and, and they said that thing about like, you know, you have the, you know, when people are in a state of rebuilding. after some major trauma. You know, there is that sense of hope and community. And now, you know, we've gone through all that and everything's kind of back. And now we're back to our old human

Starting point is 00:05:57 tricks of greed and, you know, the endless bickering between, yeah, government versus, you know, the more state level police versus religion, science. And, you know, you've got this one colonel guy at the center of all that who is sort of involved majorly with the power. And even just the concept of like when we discover things that we can like when we discover amazing or divine power and try to harness that and try to use it for our own ends and they have that one exchange between i think the the colonel and the scientist the main scientist you know about you know sort of the chasm that can exist between the two even when they're both sort of mutually aligned for you know an endeavor like this and they have that thing about like this isn't a power we

Starting point is 00:06:43 should be even messing with but we got we have to try and control it though like there's just so much wrapped up in the all about control yeah um yeah no i mean i agree with and the beautiful animation the beautiful sound no you make a lot of great points uh i like i mentioned in the intro i really aside from the title and uh you know a few little other minor details i really did not know what about this movie coming in aside from how popular it was i didn't know it would be even like fantastical at all i thought it was going to be like an action thing yeah yeah exactly that's and i'm glad honestly i'm glad i didn't know you know a ton going into it uh and i love just how eerie uh and just silent the film started uh just like set the tone for the rest of the film to you know

Starting point is 00:07:29 kind of foreshadow what we were in for and then the way you know the rest of it started to unfold with like then i thought we were kind of in a little bit like of uh you know uh you know we talk about that punker rock uh you know with the with the the bike gang and all that and i'd like okay are we are we going like the little um type of fast and furious like but with fierce meets the warriors yeah something like that and i'm like again i love the the world building and all that and just what we were going for and then when you add the the supernatural fanatical aspects and then the science fiction and all that was like oh my goodness i was just not expecting that just it kind of came out of left field for me personally and i just i loved uh just everything um

Starting point is 00:08:09 about it. And again, my head's still wrapping around what has just happened. It's one of those films for me personally that I am going to have to revisit a couple more times just to really understand the minutiaes of everything. But having said that, like, I just appreciate all the dedication

Starting point is 00:08:25 and hard work too, because I think two, the visuals played a part, like, kind of a character in itself, too. There was so much TLC put into this film. Just from the scope of the buildings and all the shots to put, like, Just the reflections on the side, the lighting coming.

Starting point is 00:08:42 I'm like, and this is in 1988, too. I know I said it once or twice, but I can't imagine how much time each freaking shot took. When we get to the trivia, I'm hoping that they reveal how long it took to make this. If not, I would appreciate you guys letting us know in the comments if you do know. But I got to imagine this film. Every single shot was meticulous and took an extreme amount of time. And you can, but you can feel. it too and also you add in the the effect of the music all the great voice acting it just everything was a

Starting point is 00:09:15 perfect blend together and then you have great characters and they're an interesting storyline that makes you think i mean this is just like this is beautiful i i just really appreciated this film on so many levels and again it's you can also tell too i love what you said earlier inspired a lot of things in pop culture later on after this so yeah i mean it's looking from the ground up through Kaneda and his friends. It's looking from like the middle level down-ish from like the military perspective, the colonel, and then from the bird's eye view with the kids, with Akira, with even Tetsuo. And I like that, yeah, so much of this, you know, I think the bike gang was a great way to kind of jump us into the current world. And I think it's funny that we see the

Starting point is 00:09:59 destruction of the old world and, you know, the minutes to midnight before the destruction of the new world. And we never get to really see the kind of peak point where people are thriving and still kind of communal with each other. It seems like it's fallen into that kind of 80s, you know, city punk vibe a little bit, but I like

Starting point is 00:10:19 that, again, even though it's not doing so, like, you know, I think it's nicely handled in all the different relationships. Like you have Condida and Kei, who you know, he's like trying to hit on her throughout the movie and like they're obviously both

Starting point is 00:10:35 involved in like the major action and you know she's tracing you know like akira the source of the power and then he just is looking for his friend and their paths converge and like you know you don't need them to do too much melodrama of like oh you know they're getting to know each other like by the time you get to the end and they have some kind of reason to call for and cling to and help each other out it just makes it just spiritually makes sense from what we've lived through and I love too that you have ultimately at the core, you know, Conida and Tetsuo and, you know, bringing it back to like, yeah, there's all the question about, you know, there are the fanatics in the streets who think that everything needs to be reset and just want to see any destruction to kind of hail that in, you know,

Starting point is 00:11:18 and then you have the military wanting to control and to wrangle the power. And at the heart of all that, all that aside, it's just these two kids, you know, and one who just doesn't want to be in the shadow anymore, who just wants to feel powerful and wants to feel like, the top dog for once and how human that motivation is and then it just so happens that this is the guy they chose to experiment on because he was a good candidate for this

Starting point is 00:11:41 program for the juju they wanted to imbue him with and watching the heartbreak as it comes back around at the end and he finally recants and he's like, please help me this has clearly gone way beyond my ability to wrangle it or to understand and like the

Starting point is 00:11:57 you know the ego death and then he comes back you know and also to what you're saying too i felt bad for him too tts tetsu because he crazy again he felt so helpless and powerless just in general because you know uh conada and just that whole gang always had to save him

Starting point is 00:12:13 he felt like and like finally getting the power that he wanted like literally yeah and now like oh it was just too much for him as well it's just I really I broke my heart for him too like you get his motivation but also the hubris of like you didn't

Starting point is 00:12:29 recognize the line at which to start Yeah, but also too, like because it was this crazy experiment, like you understand like when you combine the motivation and also this thing that he couldn't control. It's like, yeah, of course, of course. It's like you put anyone in that situation with that type of motivation. Like that would probably be so many of us. Yeah. Of course. But also I thought there was a beautiful line of or at least the visuals, what they showed us, that scene of nonlinear storytelling when it showed a little bit of their backstory and their history where it showed like, you know, where I guess he had come into their lives and where we had. had met in school where they had met each other and they'd both been bullied because it were brand new and I thought that was just again it just adds a little level of emotional vulnerability the characters and just gets us more invested as an audience I was like and it breaks my heart even more even I mean all the destruction mayhem he's causing again not totally his fault because

Starting point is 00:13:21 something is infecting him but still it just it breaks my heart more for this character I feel bad for him and also for Conada and the other um not I mean I feel bad for Kai just because of what she had to endure. But the other kid that survived, too, because he's one of them. He's part of their crew. Yeah, and even without having to spend tons of time established, like, you know, that initial

Starting point is 00:13:43 bike race is enough of an establisher. You get that this is a tight knit bunch, who probably grew up together and only had each other. Of course. And I think it's, again, I can't help but imagine that Tetsuo was intentionally named

Starting point is 00:13:59 in reference to Tetsuo, the Iron Man, the movie, which I pretty sure came before this, because yeah, like, what a flip on that, because not only is he, by the end, pulling in like mechanical parts and stuff like that, but then they're growing beyond his control, and then, like, the

Starting point is 00:14:14 bi-out, like, his body is growing beyond the control, like, phenomenal visuals and scary, and speaking of the visuals, too, the way they showed blood in this movie and just and other simple things. We talked about reflections when she was able to walk on water, the transitions,

Starting point is 00:14:31 this, when the bike was moving, the way the wind was blowing, but also like the sky, the lights and the way they were like just skirmishing in from the speed. Yeah, totally light streaks and stuff. And at the end when like the rays of sun are peering through the clouds. And even too, when the soul thing was coming down, I mean, there were just, I'm just so impressed with what they were able to. And the fact that again, this is 1988. I'm just, it's impressive. And also too for an animated film, this movie, this movie did an impressive and mature job of showing how

Starting point is 00:15:04 this world would revolve around like dealing with like I mean it was basically a nuclear thing that happened at the beginning right? Yeah it's supposed to make you think of that. Just showing like you know the civil unjust and like how it would react to like 34, 32 however many

Starting point is 00:15:20 years later just showing like how society would be after something as catastrophic as that. Yeah but like this is a very I mean again it did a good job of shifting tones in terms of going you know from playful and fun at times to extremely serious and mature and i think like there was a nice balance there too it had life and and yeah it had these little quiet almost lyrical moments that again would remind me of like a new wave movie in that you know yeah it's not

Starting point is 00:15:47 always even dialogue just here's like a little character beat here's just like a moody little aside that they did not obviously cost time to animate and money to animate right and and so yeah that brings it back around to like it's super cinematic it's like it's like it's like and not to slight anime series that play on TV or anything like that but this does it is always striking when you see something that yeah is clearly this is a movie

Starting point is 00:16:11 this is made to be played on a huge screen oh I would love to see this on the big screen yeah and the art again we've talked about like the I love how percussion forward the music the musical score was and these like the organs the weird breathy and mechanical sounds they would put in and and yeah

Starting point is 00:16:30 just like all the different things they're playing off of like and the looks of the character even that like the jacket he wears with the with the pill on the back and the bike is as a character in itself too i mean there's just so many iconic parts to this film like i i want to just revisit it right now oh yeah you just want to leave this projecting on your wall right right um let's go let's do some some terrivia uh akira means bright intelligent clear in japanese okay that's aptly chosen the movie considering of 2,212 shots and 160,000 single pictures, two to three times more than usual,

Starting point is 00:17:09 using 327 colors, another record in animation film, 50 of which were exclusively created for the film. The reason for this statistic is that most of the movie takes place at night, a setting that is traditionally avoided by animators because of the increased color requirements. I noticed, too, whenever they were in the daytime, because I was like, so much of this is at night. And I wonder, too, if maybe the increased cells are for the fact that, again, because this is a movie, especially, like, I know in animation, you're dealing often with ones, twos and threes, as they say, are you, in the 24 frames that make up a second, are you seeing one new frame every 24?

Starting point is 00:17:48 I mean, sorry, in those 24 frames, are all those 24 frames a unique new image, or are you letting two play for, you know, half the amount of time or three play for a third, a quarter of the amount of time? So, like, I bet they did a lot of ones to make the animation look as smooth as possible instead of leaving three. Is that a fact? No, no, no, I'm just saying, I'm just saying it's smooth. Yeah, that's what I meant. It didn't seem like they were doing as many, like, twos or threes. But after reading that again, we talked about how much time and energy probably took to do this. This was one of the first Japanese anime films to have the characters' voices recorded before they were animated.

Starting point is 00:18:26 Well, this is the typical practice in U.S. animation in Japan. the animation is generally produced first that's wow i mean animating it well that's a actually you know honestly i'm not sure which which method seems more sensible now that i think of it but that's fascinating like the fact that they yeah led with the performance it's crazy the film is uh is widely credited with breaking anime into mainstream western audience yeah yeah 100% oh my god i could yeah and again we could see how much inspired the other popcorn which are substantive, so totally makes sense. Computer-generated imagery

Starting point is 00:19:03 was used in the film primarily to animate the pattern indicator used by Dr. Onishi, but it was additionally used to plot the paths of falling objects, model parallax effects on backgrounds and tweak lighting and lens flares. See, this is an instance of, yeah, I sat here and

Starting point is 00:19:19 thought to myself, okay, there's some early computer because you have those, yeah, you've got the swirly read out that the doctor's reading, that like spherical energy thing, and then you also have like those couple moments where like holographic imagery shows up but the stuff too that's invisible like that's it's fascinating and i imagine yeah like there's not a ton of it but it's really well used because especially as we get into the future there and in the past you know handful of years they've been getting way better at it again but as as cgis has become more prevalent in the medium

Starting point is 00:19:49 it's you know been kind of a i feel like a something of a challenge to figure out how to make it seamless the uh just to like a couple more uh four more the film was released in 2001 with a new voice dub and soundtrack reportedly costing over one million i'm sure they did a good job it's a lot i'm sure they did a good job with that but i'm glad at least for our first watch yeah that we got to see the original i hope this is the the i'm pretty sure this i'm pretty sure this is yeah well you guys let's know i was gonna say do a new japanese soundtrack or the english i think they're talking about the english is my guess um but yeah the shot of conada's bike sliding to stop away from the camera and the opening bike chase sequence

Starting point is 00:20:29 is considered to be the most referenced shot in animation, which we were like, I've seen that shot. Ombages appear in such shows as Teen Titans, Genie, Tark Tovey's, Star Wars, Clone Wars, Samurai Jack. No, it's... We're about it at the end of a 20-minute review. Batman the Animated Series, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, adventured to May, and the Simpsons, and even Pokemon.

Starting point is 00:20:52 I'll read one more, and we'll call it last one. The computer sounds, which can be heard during Ted's... Tetsuo's body scan were taken from the mother computer and alien in 1979. No way. That's crazy. I love that fact. I love that fact. Beautiful. Anyways, John, any final thoughts? Nah, man, this is incredible.

Starting point is 00:21:11 It lived up the hype and I cannot wait to watch it again. Yes. Amen. I second that. This was awesome. But guys, let us know in the comments. Is this your favorite anime film? Are there other ones that you'd like John, myself? Any other members of the team to react to? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Until then, see you next time. Pieces.

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The Reel Rejects - AKIRA (1988) IS A MASTERPIECE!! MOVIE REVIEW!! First Time Watching!

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