Akira is to anime what Pulp Fiction is to Hollywood. There is no denying the absolute cult status of this intense, beautifully rendered materpiece by Katsuhiro Otomo. Released over a two decades ago, this defining landmark in animation was relatively unknown, receiving popularity predominantly in Japan, before filtering into the bedrooms of the Generation X tribe, where it gained its associated cult status.

Hollywood eventually began to take notice, after the teens of that era pushed aside the cheesy b-grade testosterone-fueled action flicks (any damned Van Dame movie), in favor of something different. The result was a re-release onto video (yes, video as in VHS), in the early nineties, which was when I managed to secure a copy (I actually had to rent the video at my local videostore). Needless to say, I was completely blown away.

Akira is not an easy movie to watch. It's violent, dark and gritty and the dialogue is harsh and edgy. In the first 20 minutes we are exposed to the brutal carnage between two opposing bike gangs and an attempted rape scene. Clearly this is no Disney feature. So what's it about? It's a Japanese animated film, an adaptation of 2,000 pages worth of graphic novel by Katsuhiro Otomo and set in the futuristic world of Neo-Tokyo.

Neo-Tokyo is a futuristic city, rebuilt from the ashes of World War 3 and is a hybrid mix of soaring technological science coupled with the social nightmare of violence, terrorism and corrupt politicians (seems strangely familiar these days!). Amongst all of this, there exists a new breed of powerful psychics with pre-cognitive abilities, capable of various telepathic and telekinetic powers and linked to the secretive military project known as Akira.

As Neo-Tokyo seems ready to explode, the visual imagination and attention to detail in every scene, makes for a truly unique viewing experience. There is for example, free camera movement, a phenomenon only recently used in film-making and relatively unheard of in the eighties. The style exhumes every stunt, car and motorcycle crash and emotion in hyper-reality, which later became known as bullet-time. Yes, the same technology endorsed years later by the Wachowski Brothers for the Matrix. In fact, they proudly include Akira as being one of the greatest influences for making the Matrix. It's that important.

The film tells the story of Tetsuo, a young adolescent biker and his close friend Kaneda. When Kaneda's biker gang, the Capsules, accidentally stumble upon a  military operation, Tetuo is almost killed and taken in by the government as a test sample. The tests unleash Tetsuo's latent psychic ability and he then unleashes his anger and frustration at what has been done to him at the world that has oppressed him for so long with his new telekinetic abilities. The task of stopping Tetsuo's massive rampage is left to Kaneda, with fellow friends Kei and Kai, and so starts a powerful thriller about human emotion and how it can lead to total corruption of the mind. Dreams and reality are merged into one as Tetsuo hallucinates and the very fabric of reality begins to disintegrate, fragment after fragment, as Tetsuo prepares to face the elusive Akira.

The eventual and inevitable climax of the film leaves a lot to be answered for. This form of under-assumption is a common feat today with shows like Lost and Heroes where only sufficient points and keyline plots are revealed, to keep the audience guessing and speculating along the way. I found that after my second viewing, the emotional impact of Akira had a more profound impact, my first viewing being back in the late nineties, where bells and whistles were the order of the day. Overall, Akira is a true landmark in film-making. It clearly defined a new genre for anime and is a definite addition to my list of classic science fiction movies.