garote | Top ten most influential: Movies 4

As a writing exercise, I've chosen the ten books, albums, movies, and games that were most important in defining me as a person, and challenged myself to explain why.

Some of these set my artistic tone or left huge imprints on my personality, others changed the course of my life or career. With each item I can say, "if not for this, I would be someone else right now." But why? It's a hard question to answer. A strong feeling would compel me to put something on the list, and then I'd realize I had no clue how to unpack that feeling.

Akira (1988)

I saw Akira when I was 15 years old. If a 15-year-old saw it today, assuming they could tolerate the violence, they would probably find it clichéd and uninspiring, and wonder how it could be on a ”Top 10” list. That’s unfortunate, but it’s also a testament to how ahead of its time Akira was in 1988. After 30 years pop culture has finally managed to catch up with it.

Over two generations, the DNA of Akira has been scattered into a whole menagerie of big ticket productions; from Avatar: The Last Airbender, to The Matrix, to the X-Men franchise, to the latest version of Superman, and beyond. Practically every depiction of telekinetic ability you’ve seen in a Hollywood film this century owes a debt to Akira. Every future dystopian saga revolving around a troubled teenager with special abilities - including the latest Star Wars film - leans a little or a lot on Akira’s legacy. No doubt if it had been produced three years ago instead of 30, it would have two sequels and a spin-off TV series by now.

But that’s all about the film’s impact in general. How did it impact me?

It was 1991, late in the summer. The yearly camping trip was done and there was nothing to do for the remaining few weeks of freedom before I started high school except play with my friends, wander in the woods, and bother my parents. My mother took my sisters and I to the little shopping complex near our house, and while she bought groceries she sent us kids into the murky video store to pick out one video each, for the evening’s entertainment. I blundered across Akira in the animation section and the box art promised explosions and technology so I took it home. By the time my movie was up for watching, everyone else was tired and ready for bed, so I stayed up to watch it by myself, sitting in the empty living room right up next to the TV. That was fine, because it turned out to be bloody and a bit disturbing in a way my parents would not have enjoyed.

I was fascinated by the vibrant, blocky color palette, the non-cartoony character design, the noir lighting, the sophisticated direction, and the cacophonous, semi-electronic, weirdly ritualistic musical score. And that giant demon teddy-bear sequence - holy crap! But I was most fascinated by the uniquely tai-chi inspired take on what it might be like to use telekinetic powers. Star Wars in the 70’s and 80’d had only a glimmer of this approach - Luke reaching for a dropped light saber and pulling it into his hand - but Akira took it and developed it into something much cooler and more effective. You could sling destructive force with your hands, push it outwards from yourself, bend light and impacts around you with shielding motions, lift your whole body up... The force seemed to center on your head, specifically the location of the occult third eye in your forehead, as though you were the god Shiva.

It made poetic sense, and for the rest of my teenage years I would imagine having those powers -- destroying the landscape or fighting other people, amusing myself as I stared out the window on long car trips or drifted away from a boring classroom lecture. It helped with feeling stifled and impotent and angry. It even snuck into my dreams, and has remained there.

But the real lasting power of Akira, to me and to my friends, came from the atrociously bad English dub that was slapped over it for the videocassette release in the United States.

The media company responsible for this cultural miscarriage must have decided that since Akira was animated, it must be for children, and so they hired voice actors from the American cartoon industry to fill out the cast. That’s how we got a bike punk with the voice of a Ninja Turtle, with that gnarly surf’s-up attitude and pitched-forward sarcastic inflection for every single line. It’s not “someone’s killed the manager”, it’s “SOMEone’s killed the MANager!!”

In modern terms this would be the equivalent of hiring the voice actor who plays Daisy in Mickey Mouse‘s Clubhouse to overdub the role of Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad. It’s a disaster for sure, but it’s a weirdly compelling one.

Now that I think about it, maybe those studio executives knew what they were doing, because practically every exchange of whacked-out dialogue in Akira spawned two or three catchphrases among my friends, and we pitched them back and forth at each other endlessly for years and years, long after that awful VHS dub was erased from public consciousness by a much more conventional and respectful dub with a better translation of the script, on DVD and then on Blu-ray. 30 years later and I still think it’s hilarious to scream “KANEDAAA!!!” out a car window, or tease one of my friends when they’re looking grumpy by saying “oh what do we have here, huh? Are you the FUNERAL DIRECTOR?” Or reply to some confusing explanation with a sarcastic “Ya lost me, coach!!” Or just say anything, really, in that unique punk-ass Kaneda voice. It marks me as an adult from a certain time and place, because that voice has been dubbed out of existence, and newer generations will never know it was there.

Akira snagged my imagination. It got me into anime, pushing my media consumption sideways, leading me to cyberpunk and dystopian sci-fi as well. But an equally lasting effect came from how it was butchered during its journey to my local video store, and for that I am actually grateful.

“Aaaa… it’s my braaain… WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”

(For some reason a complete Spanish dub is on YouTube ... not for long I expect. I've started this embed at my favorite scene.)

Watch on YouTube