Thirty years ago, Akira predicted the chaos of 2020

https://film.avclub.com/thirty-years-ago-akira-predicted-the-chaos-of-2020-1844237508

Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, one of the most groundbreaking and influential animated films of all time, opens with an iconic motorcycle chase through the neon streets of Neo-Tokyo, a beautiful cyberpunk Metropolis built on the ruins of old Tokyo. The rest of the city, as explained in the opening text, was wiped out in an apparent nuclear blast in 1988 that plunged the planet into another devastating World War. The main events of Akira take place decades later, just ahead of 2020, but the impact left by the war quietly hangs over everything that happens in the movie in a way that feels surprisingly relevant to what’s going on in our very real 2020.

This is most obvious in a weirdly prescient bit of scenery first shown immediately after the violent bike chase, which ends with main protagonist Shotaro Kaneda and his friends getting arrested while his injured childhood buddy Tetsuo is taken “to a hospital” by mysterious government agents. On a sign in front of a construction site, Akira teases that Neo-Tokyo will be the site of the 2020 Olympic Games, just like how regular Tokyo in the real world was going to be the site of the 2020 Olympics until they were postponed because of COVID-19. In Akira, the sign promoting the Olympics also has a message in Japanese advocating for unity: “With everyone’s support, let’s make this a success.” People don’t seem to be buying that, though, because underneath is some graffiti that reads “Just cancel it”—another parallel to our 2020, and one that reflects a deeper connection between Akira and what we’re going through.

As established over the course of the bike chase, there are rising tensions in Neo-Tokyo between the haves and have-nots—a conflict the film draws attention to with the bikers harassing a corporate office drone in a car and a wealthy couple who are literally sitting with their backs to what’s happening on the streets. There’s also a steadily growing protest happening at the same time as the biker duel, with a quick glimpse of a TV news report mentioning that a “skirmish has broken out between student protestors and riot police.” (Note the familiar lack of blame put on either party for starting the fight; TV news is apparently ineffectual in every reality.) In Akira, it’s legitimately unclear why the protest turns violent; one moment there’s a seemingly peaceful march, the next the protestors are flipping over militaristic police vehicles, while—in a moment of dark humor that is darker and less humorous now—a riot cop launches a tear gas canister directly into someone’s chest.

The scene is recognizable even if its causes don’t quite match our circumstances. In our world, protestors are marching against injustice and cops are jumping to lethal force. Things escalate, and while it’s not always clear how exactly that happens, we do know that one side tends to show up looking to talk and the other shows up looking for a fight. In Akira, the protest is about tax reforms, a suggestion that the three decades since the war have been good to the rich people of Neo-Tokyo and to no one else. We’re marching against systemic racism and police violence in 2020, but let’s not forget that our rich people are making out pretty well, too: Billionaires have made billions more over the course of the pandemic while millions of Americans have lost their jobs. (Fox News actually aired a graphic correlating major events of civil unrest and violence against Black people—like the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rodney King verdict—with a positive bump in the stock market.)

Akira’s Olympics are a literal manifestation of the tension between the powerful and the powerless. The games are never directly addressed again, but the sign and the “cancel it” graffiti sprayed underneath are enough to prove that the impending games are a sham, being used to paper over Neo-Tokyo’s civil unrest in hopes of convincing everyone to surrender to complacency for the sake of getting back to normal. The sign might as well read, “Let’s stop protesting, let’s all band together to support something totally normal like the Olympics, and also let’s re-open the economy!”

Okay, that last bit is mostly from the real world. The push for the Olympics to happen in the movie springs from the same mindset driving a lot of our craven politicians and pundits, which is that the real victim of this virus is the economy. COVID is surging again all over the country and predictions for the death toll are skyrocketing, yet people are falling for this idea that it’s okay for bars and restaurants and movie theaters to reopen because they have to—as if there’s no other option. (Though, given lawmakers’ reluctance to approve significant government aid packages, maybe there isn’t.)