AKIRA Home Page

I have also a "messages of the day" function. Whenever the home page is altered, I'll say it to you. Outside of my home page, I rarely speak (you probably know this ^_^), so use this chance!

Moving day! The whole site has moved to http://www.lool.net/Akira now. Beside that, not much has changed, except the slightly altered directory structure.

Go to the Messages of the day section to look up what I've said earlier.

This page has been awarded.
About the Author
The picture archive
More stuff for Akira addicts
Info on Akira Club Artbook
The Akira-FAQ (Version 1.08)
The (small) Akira-Ascii-Art collection
The Akira CD guide

Akira is a manga (Japanese Comic). Manga aren't well known in other countries, but Akira managed to grow even more popular in western countries than in Japan. The american company Marvel has had the original colorized and so all western releases of Akira feature nice colours.

Akira tells a story, which could have begun in the midst of the cold war. (But the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, we know.)

The Story:

Tokyo, as we know it, was destroyed by a kind of a new super-bomb of unknown origin. 9 hours after, World War III broke out and most of the major cities in the world were completely destroyed. 31 years after, Neo-Tokyo now stands, were the old Tokyo has been.

One night, Kaneda and his motorcycle gang have an accident with a little boy with a wrinkled face, as one of an old man. Tetsuo, one of the gang's members crashes into the boy, who mysteriously remains unhurt and then simply vanishes from the eye.

Tetsuo is brought to Hospital, and everything seems to have normalized. But that is not at all the case:

The strange boy from the last night was a part of a secret military project dealing with supernatural powers. The project is lead by the "Colonel", who wants to develop human weapons with aid of these powers. On his trail are Ryu and Kei (not Kay), members of a semi-terroristic group, who want to discover and destroy his plans.

And now Tetsuo is going to be a new member of the project. But his powers rise much faster than the Colonel has expected. Tetsuo manages to find out the location of an underground freeze chamber, where the mysterium AKIRA is kept.

Akira, too was a member of the project. But why did they put him in the freeze chamber at 0,0005 Kelvin ? They were afraid of something. Something they couldn't control anymore. Something Tetsuo is going to set free really soon . . .

And in midst of all the trouble: Kaneda and Kei.

Technical Data:

Author:			Katsuhiro Otomo
Size:			2160 pages, (16.5x23.5 cm)
First Appearance:	December 1982 in "Young Magazine"
Colors:			Steve Oliff (original is B/W)

The Film

There exists an Akira anime, too. It's been directed by Otomo himself, but even he has difficulties in packing 2000 pages into a film of 124 minutes. The result is a very compressed and modified story, but the show is still fun to watch. The technical quality is on highest standard (at least it was back then) and there are stunning action scenes.

Here are some text files regarding the Akira anime. They're HTMLized versions of the text files once stored on Venice and probably at the IMDB. Here's a newspaper article, with comments on the film. It's title is Uncontrolled Science and appeared on a Friday the 13th ^_^.

There are two synopses of the film: from Capricorn and Animedia, two anime magazines. Be careful when you have not yet seen the film; these documents reveal its complete story. Another thing: Be careful when pronouncing the name "Kay". Phonetic transcription: [Kei]. European Akira fans: just write and say "Kei".

Here are two reviews on the film. They're by Jeff Meyer and Clark Parkhurst. These are a good example on how many different opinions concerning the film exist.

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