Inspirations: Akira

An artist that has had a big influence on me would be Katsuhiro Otomo the creator of Akira, the long running manga which midway through the comic's storyline was adapted into an anime. this is the most fascinating comic I've had the pleasure of reading, and definitely the longest - spanning 6 volumes the comic is an epic 2182 pages long and you really get a sense of journey when you've turned that last page...

Otomo really immerses his audience in this future dystopian tokyo through astounding technical ability and masterful storytelling, the sequences which really stood out to me would be the corporeal transformations Tetsuo goes through (which are clearly symbolic of his inner turmoil), and the devastation of neo tokyo, these episodes play out for dozens of pages and become quite surreal in their abstraction of the disaster by their fixation on the destruction of a jungle of colossal buildings to the exclusion of human reaction.

the look of the characters while quite stylised are still very believable as people, which is suitable seeing as this is a dark and serious seinen manga, but it's worth remembering that manga in the 80's hadn't yet been exaggerated (simplified is a better word I guess) into an assemblage of symbols standing in for representations of the human form.

The world of Akira is vast and complex in it's visual analogy and unravelling of the human condition, the use of metaphor that this masterpiece works with is something I would be interested to write about, maybe I will for my upcoming essay..