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:INFO.half
Akira (1988)
Otomo adapted his own unfinished manga with a hundred and sixty thousand hand painted cels and recorded the dialogue first.

:STATS
[icon:CLOCK] Runtime | 124 minutes
[icon:STAR] Director | Katsuhiro Otomo
[icon:CHART] Budget | $5.5 million
[icon:TRENDING_UP] Box office | $49 million worldwide
[icon:FIRE] Score | Tsutomu Ōhashi

:INFO
Animation At Feature Film Discipline
Japanese television animation had spent two decades economising: limited frame rates, held cels, mouths that move in three positions. Akira was made to the opposite specification. Around a hundred and sixty thousand cels, a palette extended with colours mixed for the film, backgrounds detailed enough to hold a close up, and prelay dialogue recorded before animation so that lip movement matches actual speech, which almost nothing in Japanese animation did at the time. The story compresses a manga Otomo had not finished writing into two hours: a motorcycle gang, a military psychic programme, and a friend whose power grows faster than his ability to hold a body together. Neo Tokyo is drawn as a city with functioning infrastructure, which is why the destruction registers.

:JOURNEY
Watching Akira
3 Speeding
4 Collided
4 Tested
3 Escalating
5 Unstable
5 Reborn

:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Kaneda · Akira · 1988]
Tetsuo!

:CHECKLIST
What to watch for
[ ] Prelay dialogue: mouths that actually match the recorded performance
[ ] The red bike slide, reshot and quoted by dozens of later films
[ ] Backgrounds detailed enough to sustain a static hold
[ ] Geinoh Yamashirogumi's score built from gamelan, taiko and Noh chorus
[ ] A city with working infrastructure so the destruction has something to destroy

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The production committee included Kodansha, Toho, Bandai and others, the model that later financed most large anime features, and its budget of around a billion yen was unprecedented.

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Its arrival on video in Britain and America created the Western anime market. Almost every serious distributor of Japanese animation outside Japan traces its founding to this film.

:LINK
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094625/
Akira on IMDb: full cast and crew