AKIRA

Voices: Mitsuo Iwada (Kaneda), Nozumo Sasaki (Tetsuo), Mami Koyama (Kei), Taro Ishida (colonel), Tessyo Genda (Ryu), Mizuho Suzuki (doctor), Tatsuhiko Nakamura (Takashi, “Number 26”), Kazuhiro Kando (Masaru, “Number 27”)

Director/Screenplay/Editor: Katsuhiro Otomo
Producers: Ryohei Suzuki, Shunzo Kato
Production co: Akira Committee
Screenplay: Katsuhiro Otomo, Izo Hashimoto. Based on the manga by Otomo
Editor: Takeshi Seyama
Chief animator: Takashi Nakamura
Music: Shoji Yamashiro

REVIEWS

“It’s 2019 in Neo-Tokyo, and the social and political situation is in crisis. Street gangs run riot in the shadow of gleaming high-rises, where a corrupt government maintains token control over a powerful military and scientific complex. But that tyranny is threatened when a teen motorcycle gang accidentally interferes with a terrorist attempt to liberate a strange, withered child who is the product of the military’s reckless pursuit of godlike power.

At the time of its release in the late ‘80s, Akira provoked a worldwide interest in anime, the colorful and operatic Japanese style of animation. In adapting his own comic book to the screen, director and cowriter Otomo splurged on the number of individual cels and the range of colored inks with which he realized the plumes of blood and smoke, rent bodies and hurtling motorcycles. The results are striking, arguably even more so in this new edition, remastered from analog sources and projected digitally. The vision of a homicidal teen biker in his pink-polo-shirt-and-white-slacks uniform is a perfect emblem of the straight-faced, inadvertent nuttiness that makes anime so irresistible.”

— Bruce Bennett, Time Out New York

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

New Plymouth
Wednesday, 7 March, 6:00pm

Palmerston North
Monday, 7 May, 6:00pm*

Auckland
Monday, 14 May, 6:30pm *

Queenstown
Tuesday, 22 May, 8:15pm

Hamilton
Monday, 28 May, 8:00pm*

Canterbury
Monday, 11 June, 7:30pm

*Denotes DCP screening