In the Flesh: Akira (4k Restoration) (Patreon)

It’s been twenty years since I first saw Katsuhiro Otomo’s legendary science fiction/body horror film Akira, hunched breathless and nauseous just a few feet from the television, the volume turned down to a whisper so my sleeping parents wouldn’t overhear. Since then I’ve been drawn back to it somewhere around a dozen times, seeing my own dual puberties reflected in its images of seething flesh and muscle, my turbulent boyhood and adolescence in the brittle, angry Tetsuo’s competing inferiority complex and need for love . Before today, though, I’d never seen it in a theater, Otomo’s vibrant colors blazing thirty feet high in the air-conditioned dark, the propulsive soundtrack booming out over a spellbound audience. The restoration deserves unqualified praise; the film’s animation is as smooth as silk and as rich as cream, every little tic and background detail imbued with vibrant life. A tossed soda can tumbling over industrial piping, discarded toys swirling together into an avatar of prolonged, grotesque childhood; great or small, every facet of Akira is at once crystal-clear and believably hairy, suggestive of a much wider, wilder world.

When the titular child psychic Akira’s frozen tomb emerges from the earth under an Olympic stadium at the film’s climax, the ponderous grace of severed coolant cables arcing through banks of fog like the tentacles of a dying kraken is enough to beggar belief. Knowing the punishing hours and back-breaking work behind the film only serves to make it more astonishing, a feat on the scale of the grandest cathedral ceiling. Watch the killing strobe of the SOL satellite’s orbital laser, the rolling boil of Tetsuo’s monstrous infantile form, and understand that measured in work hours, twenty years of labor are onscreen in front of you. Akira is the Chrysler Building. It’s Notre Dame. Restored, that labor is more clearly visible than ever, every window polished, every fresco dusted and retouched.

More than its status as a monument in modern art history, though, it is Tetsuo who stands as the film’s most enduringly relevant fixture. His heart-wrenching, infuriating blend of knee-jerk viciousness and bottomless insecurity eerily prefigures the modern archetype of the Jordan Petersen set, young men who believe simultaneously that their destiny is to conquer the world and that they are completely impotent in the face of life’s smallest challenges, beholden to the same women they loathe and mistreat for everything from sex to clean laundry. Tetsuo bullies and abuses his shy girlfriend, Kaori, but when his powers run rampant his new monstrous body reaches for her with babyish terror, pulling her into the pale churn of its folds and muscled slabs until it literally crushes and absorbs her. “My body isn’t doing what I tell it,” he wails to Kaneda. Moments later he says with mounting horror that her pain is coming into him, an involuntary empathy which drives him almost mad. He is a thing that takes, even after the act of taking becomes suicidal. In this delicate analysis of the teenage masculine psyche, as in so much else, Akira remains untouchable.