Aim for the body rare, you'll see it on TV.

ferriswheelonfire replied to your post: So, I watched Akira last night.

Akira is so fucking good.

I know, right? The animation is some of the best I’ve seen in an anime. The only thing that comes close that uses real ink and paint (as opposed to the now-universal digital ink and paint process, which I didn’t know had been around since 1989, where Disney used it at the very end of The Little Mermaid, and have used it exclusively since then; I know they used CGI in Beauty and the Beast, but I figured it was mixed with traditional ink and paint; I assumed they started animating entirely digitally with Hercules, when it became obvious) is Princess Mononoke and maybe some of Studio Ghibli’s other work prior to that, but Princess Mononoke has some scenes that use digital ink and paint, and also uses a bit of CGI for special effects (which Akira also uses a bit of). And maybe The Wings of Honneamise, but that has this strange thing of going from pretty good but still average-looking animation during dialogue scenes to HOLY FUCK THIS IS GORGEOUS during scenes with vehicles and machinery, like the unbelievably beautiful flight scenes in the film.

And even Princess Mononoke doesn’t have the nearly three-dimensional look that Akira has. Princess Mononoke arguably has better shading and character design and even art direction, but it doesn’t quite have the amazing holy-shit-people-drew-this feel that Akira has, although Studio Ghibli’s films after Princess Mononoke do, but they started using digital ink and paint exclusively after Mononoke (they do a great job of hiding it, though; one of my friends is convinced they still use traditional ink and paint, even though absolutely nobody does anymore). It’s not that it becomes impossible to tell it’s animated or that you forget it is (that would be ridiculous), but to me, I’m usually not constantly thinking that while watching something. Yeah, a really nicely animated scene will make me think that, especially if it’s noticeably better than the vast majority of the other animation in the film or series, but pretty much the entire time I was watching Akira, I constantly had to reassure myself that yes, this was painstakingly drawn by (many) human hands and did not spring fully formed from Katsuhiro Otomo’s head.

The one thing I haven’t seen in any other anime to my knowledge that I saw in Akira was the fact that it used lip-synced mouths instead of the traditional mouth flaps (which can be anything from simple flaps to more realistic-looking mouths, but still use the same principle of making the lips move more or less uniformly instead of based on the phonemes and timing of the dialogue). This is standard in most other animation — at least in animated films, but not in TV series — so you might not think much of it. But traditionally, what they do in anime is animate the entire scene and then have voice actors do their thing, which makes anime really easy to dub convincingly as long as you write a script that fits the mouth flaps and have voice actors who are able to deliver their lines that match them at least fairly closely while still having a pacing and inflection that doesn’t sound completely unnatural (this was a big problem with older dubs, as the writers for the dub scripts were just not as good, and neither were the voice actors; the most obvious example would be Speed Racer, whereeveryonetalksasiftheresnosuchthingaspunctuationorspacesandsomehoweveryonehasinfinitelungcapacity, but more hilariously bad examples would be a lot of the stuff coming out in the ’90s, particularly the early ’90s). Akira isn’t like that, and I’ve seen some clips of the 2001 redub (to replace the original dub, which was considered very good back when it was released in 1989, but has absolutely horrendous issues with matching the mouth movements, as well as pretty bad voice acting by today’s standards and lots of mispronunciation of the various names — people who grew up with the original dub and bought the 2001 dub when the movie first came out on DVD, or those same people buying it on Blu-ray today who still don’t realize that the Streamline dub is only available on the 2-disc DVD release from 2004 complain about the 2001 dub for pronouncing everything right, especially Kaneda’s name, which a lot of dumbfucks on YouTube have said sounds wrong because it sounds too much like “Canada” in the newer dub, which is hilarious because they’re just pronouncing it like it’s pronounced in the Japanese version, i.e, correctly, where yes, it does vaguely sound like “Canada,” particularly the Japanese transliteration of the country’s name, which is “Kanada,” which is also a Japanese family name like Kaneda is; it’s also not a very accurate translation, which was another problem with older dubs), which is really impressive to see, since they tried really hard to match the lip movements, and they did a pretty good job of it.

That said, Akira is probably the one anime I would say that you absolutely need to watch in Japanese, since every dub has the “Hong Kong dub” effect to an extent, as, well, I already explained why. I mean, I usually recommend the Japanese version of every anime to most people because I really prefer to hear the performances the director approved of, and because I think that outright refusing to watch the original version is more than a little bit disrespectful to the director and the voice actors. That said, when a dub is really good, it’s worth watching both, but even nowadays, when all dubs are at least watchable at the bare minimum, I only watch a dub if there’s a general consensus that it’s outstanding, and only after watching the Japanese version. The one exception I make is when a dub is so bad it’s hilarious, which is made even better if the anime itself is also similarly awful. In those cases, watching the dub is imperative, as it’ll generally turn something that’s just painful to watch into a laugh riot.

Some may call me an elitist. Some may even call me a weeaboo. I don’t care.

I realize I just spent all this time talking about the animation and various things related to it, ending up talking about my opinion on anime dubbing (which I don’t think is bad; I just think that people who are so fucking stubborn that they won’t learn how to read subtitles, a skill that, I might add, doesn’t take very fucking long to pick up, and they don’t have a legitimate excuse that prevents them from being able to — such as being blind or dyslexic, in which case I can completely understand — should go kindly fuck themselves). XD

I still haven’t formed my opinion on the themes in it, though, or at least not fully enough for me to be able to articulate it to the extent I’d like to.