This summer, MovieJawn is counting down our 25 favorite action movies of all time! We will be posting a new entry each day! See the whole list so far here.

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

If you’ve seen five anime movies—and I’ve seen about six—one of them is Akira (dir. Katshiro Otomo, 1988). It’s huge, and it’s undeniable. Unlike other standards of the medium, its creator hasn’t released much work besides his masterpiece. Otomo’s comics other than Akira either aren’t available in English or are long out-of-print, and he’s only written and directed one other full-length animated film, Steamboy (2004), since Akira was released.

So this is it. You watch Akira, and then, you spend years getting used to the idea there’s nothing else like it. There probably won’t be another one, either. Hand-drawn cel animation has been replaced by cheaper, quicker, less tactile CGI. The studio would never return another of your emails if your producer went in and asked for that much time and that much money to make sure every window in the Neo-Tokyo cityscape was given as much detail as Otomo’s crew gives the ones here.

That detail is a big part of why Akira is the only animated film on this list, though. Impossible things happen in this movie, but they feel as real as they possibly could because they’re given equal weight with the banal. Giant, undulating masses of muscle and flesh are given the same care as bridges and bikes. It’s the artificial equivalent of practical effects, and it’s only possible with the kind of effort a person can only deliver a couple times in their life.

One of the barriers between anime and me–and probably the main reason I don’t engage with more of it–is narrative wonkiness. So much of it is overly complicated, with convoluted justifications for why you’re watching two robots fight. Anime directors will perv out uncomfortably but only after explaining that the real pervs are a sub-race of demons who blah blah blah. The emotions get blurred through all of the explanations. I‘d rather read works like manga artist Jiro Taniguchi’s comics–where people walk slowly through the world–than listen to a primer on why so many anime androids somehow look like naked women involved in hysterical melodrama.

Akira is convoluted: it is melodrama, and its characters are hysterical, famously shouting each other’s names as they fire sci-fi guns. And I still can’t tell you how some of its pieces fit. All these watches later and I’d have to be actively watching Akira to tell you why the rodent-looking businessman is running around Neo Tokyo with a briefcase full of drugs. None of it gets in the way, though, because Otomo’s focus is always on two teen boys Going Through It. Every action scene and almost every significant emotional beat features one or both of these two kids hormoning out over jealousy, control, feelings of inadequacy and rage. I don’t need to be able to articulate why a dangerously psychic kid’s internal organs were buried under an Olympic stadium because Akira is about the mopey teen who found those organs and how he both wants to protect his girlfriend and take over the world. There’s Tetsuo, the picked-on living bomb, and there’s Kaneda, the brash gang leader, and the whole “Akira” of it all is window dressing if you want it to be.

That makes for a great action framework. After the first, stunning bike chase, which might be my favorite action scene of all time, there are three types of action: if Kaneda is alone, he’s trying to find and kill Tetsuo. If Tetsuo is alone, he’s trying to escape the government. If Tetsuo and Kaneda are together, they’re trying to kill each other.

That doesn’t mean the action is repetitive. Kaneda and a friend zip through the sewers on flying bikes in one scene, and Tetsuo fights giant toys controlled by the title character’s wrinkled little friends in the next. A fight through a medical facility’s hallways spills out onto the streets–trading soldiers for tanks–and then leaves the atmosphere when a satellite in Earth's orbit fires an energy beam down onto whoever's left. The film, after a brief introduction, kicks off with Kaneda, Tetsuo, and their friends jumping on motorcycles to fight a rival gang at speeds so high Otomo focuses, for a moment, on the tears in his bikers' eyes. Their taillights leave ghost trails in their wake. Kaneda and a hulk of a man have a motorcycle joust. As the movie ends, Kaneda is driving that same bike around an arena, shooting a laser at Tetsuo, whose burgeoning psychic abilities have outpaced his body's capabilities to control them. Kaneda avoids the apocalypse's debris while Tetsuo becomes a series of bladders and veins. Every pebble of that debris and every pulse of those veins is expressed in too much detail to take in at once, which is not to say you don't feel how terrifying and disgusting the sum of it all is as you're watching the movie.

The action is overwhelming. When I watch a movie with quick cuts and a jerky camera, I can sometimes wonder if I'm watching anything at all. When Paul Greengrass chucks his camera into the passenger seat or Michael Bay whip pans from one car to another, I can enjoy myself–I'm absolutely not saying these moves result in bad movies–but the camera motion is the effect. If Yasujirō Ozu was filming the same action from a static vantage point, I'd just have a better sense that I was watching a car move. When I watch Akira, the car is moving and every building on the street has unique neon ads glaring down and a half-dozen kids in Mad Max get-ups are attacking the car with pipes and homemade grenades and the people in the restaurant across the way are looking through the window, wondering what's happening. It's mayhem, but every piece has been perfectly animated. It's not that I think a lot of stuff is happening; it's that a lot of stuff is happening. It's that the jukebox one of the characters is perusing before the chase has more life than any fireball explosion in any of my beloved Cannon Films. And we aren't getting another one of these in this lifetime. So let's watch Akira again.