Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Akira
1988 · Katsuhiro Otomo · Akira on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the taillight smear into a long red streak on the road. (camera)
Otomo repeats this light-trail effect, along with lens flare and racking focus, throughout, treating the drawn world as if a real camera shot it.
Payoff: The hand-painted photography gives fantastical events the physical weight of documentary footage.
Listen for chanting and gamelan replacing a normal orchestral score. (sound)
Geinoh Yamashirogumi's music, built from Indonesian gamelan, Balinese vocals, and Noh chant, recurs as ritual rather than illustration, from 'Kaneda' to the climactic choral surges.
Payoff: The score builds a sonic world as total and strange as the city on screen.
Notice how fast action cuts suddenly stop into one long still shot. (cutting)
Editor Takeshi Seyama alternates rapid-fire cutting in chases and riots with held, contemplative compositions, repeating this rhythm again and again.
Payoff: The contrast trains you to feel speed and its aftermath as two distinct kinds of attention.
Notice that Neo-Tokyo is built directly over a fenced-off crater. (staging)
The film keeps returning to this crater at the city's heart, the site the opening blast destroyed and the new city rose above.
Payoff: The neon city is what the reading calls the derived milieu, a polished skin stretched over an originary world it cannot erase. In the reading: originary-world. The buried crater is the originary world; the glowing city above it is the derived milieu built to cover it.
Watch how tightly mouths and faces match the recorded dialogue. (performance)
Because Akira was prescored, Iwata (Kaneda) and Sasaki (Tetsuo) recorded their lines first, and animators matched bodies and faces to that performance.
Payoff: The characters read as specific, insecure adolescents rather than generic action archetypes.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the bike slide's light trail, then notice how often stillness follows speed.