From Ground Zero to Degree Zero: Akira from Origin to Oblivion

Let me begin with my own origin story. It was in March 1990 at the Music Box Theater in Chicago that I first saw Akira, and as the anime unfolded from its astonishing opening sequence, it set off a reaction in me. It was one of a series of encounters with Japanese film and fiction that year that propelled a software engineer improbably into graduate school in Japanese literature, as if the light coming off the theater screen had changed me in parallel with the film’s story of psychic radiation, mutation, and transformation. ¹

And clearly I was not alone. For anyone seeking the origins of the anime boom in the United States, Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s 1988 film is an irresistible starting point. One of the most lavishly produced anime to date, Akira brought anime from U.S. TV screens onto movie screens, a format suited to the epic physical scale of Ōtomo’s story. Even its limited U.S. theatrical release in 1989 and 1990 attracted wide attention from audiences and critics. This has led many to identify Akira as the origin or ground zero for the explosion of anime’s popularity in North America in the 1990s. ²

In what follows I will examine Akira’s critical reception in the United States, to ask what was unique about this film at the time and what remains remarkable twenty-five years later. Paradoxically, Akira has been regarded both as a watershed moment in the history of anime and as an attempt to erase history itself, based primarily on its frenetic visuals and complex plot. I would like to look more concretely at the visual language of Akira by comparing it with a similar story in a different medium, the epic Akira manga that Ōtomo authored in parallel with the film. The comparison shows more specifically how the visual language of the film and the manga support or undermine the search for the kind of historical and political narratives we might associate with decisive origins or causes.

GROUND ZERO: AKIRA’S NUCLEAR ORIGINS

The characterization of Akira as a kind of bombshell that set off the anime boom is all the more tempting given the film’s opening sequence, which is a literal explosion. The film fades in on an aerial view of a city, with the superimposed title “1988.7.16. Tokyo” (the date of the film’s Japanese release). As the camera pans up to take in more and more of the distant city, there is the sound of wind on the otherwise silent soundtrack, and then a dome of alternating light and darkness appears at a distant point in the city’s center. It illuminates the entire city in a harsh glare and then expands toward the viewer, sweeping away the city, until the light fills the frame (Figure 1). Slowly, an aerial view of a new, transformed city resolves itself out of this whiteness. An echoing drumbeat marks a transition to a more musical soundtrack, and a second title appears: “31 years after WW III. AD 2019 Neo Tokyo.”

This ninety-second opening image—of a detonation that heralds violent change and renewal—became a metaphor for the influence of Akira on North American popular culture and anime’s fortunes in the United States. As one popular guide to anime has it, “Just as the bubble of Japan’s economy of the 1980s was about to burst, a bomb of a more positive nature detonated, with the premier of Akira.”³ But of course the more disturbing parallel is between this opening detonation and the atomic bombings of Japan. To see Akira in the United States in 1990 was to be transported back in history to the moment of Hiroshima at the very same instant one seemed to be lifted out of the story and out of the theater to see a flash of a new future for Japanese film (Figure 2).⁴ In fact, these two senses of the explosion—as a celebratory, artistic, even metatextual one that seems to productively explode the rules or boundaries a...