Table of Contents
The Setting
The settings of Akira and Metropolis are both placed firmly within the realm of science fiction, though the way that the two films go about depicting their respective science fiction universes is very different. These art styles and aesthetics take very different approaches to achieve the same goal, depicting a world that has something deeply wrong with it.
Metropolis’s world is lavish, and the city uses a hodgepodge of different design aesthetics that give the city the feeling of being an alternate reality take on an American City. The walls in certain areas are inlaid with Art Deco Designs that scream 1920s. The dingy bars of the lower section look like they would belong comfortably in 40’s noir film and the hover cars zipping through the street have a 1950’s vibe to them.
The early to mid-1900’s American design aesthetics are reinforced by the music in the film, which uses a lot of jazz as well as the song “I Can’t Stop Loving you” performed by Ray Charles The city itself was built on a system of levels with the surface housing the upper echelons of its society. These upper levels are vibrant and colorful with some of the buildings seeming to be made of gold. This holds true…until the story takes you to the lower levels of the city. As the story leads you deeper in to Metropolis’s depths the more decayed rusted and broken down everything seems to get.
127 our experts are availableright now
This doesn’t mean that these areas are abandoned and lifeless however. Dingy back alleys house bars and the more residential areas are lit in many neon hues. The cities construction is almost dream like with odd vehicles, monsters’ attractions decorating the surface and networks of twisting cables and pipes that seem to go on forever populating the lower levels.
Akira’s world in stark contrast is a bit more grounded. The city itself resembles a much more modern one but with a slight futuristic twist. This makes sense seeing as how Akira takes place in the year 2019. Neo-Tokyo, the city that Akira takes place in, is neither as dilapidated as the lower sections, or as lavish and dream like as the upper section of Metropolis’s city but the world is a living functioning civilization…for a time. Akira’s world does have a cyberpunk edge to it all, enough so that many reviewers at the time of the films release in the west applied the label to the film. This is also reinforced by the synthesizer tinged soundtrack that has basically characterized the 80’s. In contrast Metropolis’s world would fit in more with steampunk, if you could even categorize it in the first place.
Finally, the settings do contain 2 major points of similarity. The first is that fact that both stories show major portions of the populace that are destitute, oppressed and not left with much hope. For Akira it can be seen in the way that the government is willing to kidnap and experiment on the people that wider society has forgotten about and this abuse can be traced back to what started the conflict in the film. In Metropolis’s case it can be seen with both the poor and forgotten citizens at the lower levels of the city and robots that are beat, shot and made to work like slaves all over the city. The second point of similarity is that both settings end in a similar fashion, The city that the story takes place in is destroyed in a cataclysmic event that leaves the world changed in a drastic way.
Character Designs
The way the characters of both Metropolis and Akira are depicted couldn’t be radically more different. Metropolis’s character design adheres consistently to Osamu Tezuka’s iconic manga style. The characters in Metropolis are bold and cartoonish and look as if they leapt out of a 40’s and 50’s cartoon and landed in a world that they don’t belong in. The cartoonish character designs with their bulbous arms, large eyes and simple shapes can sometimes clash with the highly detailed backdrops that make up the film.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it causes the characters to pop, making even the background characters distinctive. The Characters in Metropolis can easily draw comparisons to early rubber hose and Disney character designs from the early and mid-20th century. This can be reinforced due to Tezuka’s influence from the early Disney and rubber hose cartoons that were immensely popular in Japan before and after WWII. “Tezuka was trying to copy the Disney pipeline” at least that’s what the film maker Michael Arias states.
In contrast we have the characters in Akira. I wouldn’t classify them as realistic per say but they are stylized, just not to the extent that the characters in Metropolis are. Akira’s characters are far more realistically proportioned. Stylization is still present however. Certain side characters such as Yamagata have slightly exaggerated facial features. Adding to the more realistic and grounded style, characters don’t exhibit the stereotypical large eyes that characterizes a lot of anime and manga character design.
This comes into stark contrast with Metropolis whose character almost all universally have massive cartoonish eyes that are drawn in much more detail than the simple black pupils used for Akira’s cast. Overall the grounded approach to character design allows for Akira’s characters to meld in well with the stories world which also takes on a more realistic tone. This adds to the more serious and grimmer story that is being told as opposed to Metropolis’s more fantastical atmosphere.
Both films have one character each that exhibits a major transformation towards the end of the film. For Metropolis it’s the character of Tima and for Akira it’s Tetsuo. These two characters undergo a transformation that somewhat mirror each other. In Tima’s case it’s when she hooks her self into the massive super weapon known as the Ziggurat that drives the main conflict of the film. When she hooks herself in, wires and cables begin to attach to her causing her to take on far more robotic features as opposed to the human form that normally covers her.
For Tetsuo, as his psychic powers get stronger he must absorb more matter to keep himself alive. Unlike with Time however, Tetsuo takes on a much more drastic transformation that adds more and more organic matter. This changes him from a human teenager with a big forehead to building sized pound of mutated flesh that sort of resembles a massive baby. These two transformations mirror each other, as one character becomes more robotic in one film the other can be seen becoming more organic in the other.
Adaptation
Something that is very interesting about both Akira and Metropolis is the fact that they are Adaptations of previous source material. Well it’s not that interesting seeing as how a massive amount of anime was originally a manga but the way that both films adapt their original material is interesting. Both films make relatively big changes to their narratives that differ greatly from the original works
Metropolis was originally one of Taluka’s earliest works, having been created in 1949. On top of that the Metropolis manga was part of a trilogy of books that are more connected by theme rather than narrative. Adding even further to the daisy chain is that Metropolis is very loosely inspired by the 1927 silent film Metropolis.
This connection is extremely loose because Tezuka had never actually seen the 1927 film and had only seen a picture of the robotic woman from the film. All three version vary widely in terms of sequence of events, themes and characters. One way that the film adheres to Tezuka’s original work is the use of Tezuka’s star system. Characters in Tezuka comics were more akin to actors rather than original unique characters. He often reused his characters with variations of their personalities.
The Character of Rock for example appears in many Tezuka stories as either a hardened villain or an innocent boy. This reuse of characters was a great way of reassigning tasks to different assistants and for cost saving measure, but it also showed Tezuka’s interest in reincarnation. Some Characters in the film are swapped out and some have much more prominent roles. Rocks character for example has a much larger roll to play in the film than he did in the manga and the character of Tima was never actually in the original work.
Akira on the other hand adapts its source material very differently. For one thing the film begins in line with its manga and ends in line with the manga. The thing with the Akira Manga, by Katsuhiro Otomo who also directed the film, is that it’s a six-volume series with each volume sitting between 300 and 400 pages. The film on the other hand is roughly 2 hours long including the credits. For the film to be made essentially whole chunks of the manga had to be removed entirely.
Certain changes are massive, for example the character of Akira is never actually in the film Akira, at least not alive. Where as in the manga Akira play a prominent roll in the story. There is an entire middle saga that is simply not present in the film. Certain characters and events end up having far less importance in the film than they do in manga, Akira for example ends up forming an alliance with the character of tetsuo but due to him not actually being in the film this whole series of events never occur.
Both films are examples of needing to make concessions when adapting from one medium to another and in the case of animation can be especially true given that everything must be made by hand. For metropolis it is showing how much the film deviated from its original conception. The director and screen writer, Rintaro and Otomo, both acknowledge that they may have deviated in ways that Tezuka would not agree with from his original work. In the case of Akira, it’s knowing the fact that you can’t keep everything when bringing a story from one medium to another and sometime large chunks of a story need to be cut out and reworked in order to thrive in a different art form.
Bibliography
- McCarthy, Helen. The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga. Ilex, 2013.
- “Modern Manga Is Developed, with Heavy Hollywood/Animation Influences.” Manga and Anime Go to Hollywood, by Northrop Davis, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, pp. 135–136.
- Park, Jane Chi Hyun. “Stylistic Crossings: Cyberpunk Impulses in Anime.” World Literature Today, vol. 79, no. 3/4, 2005, pp. 62–63., doi:10.2307/40158943.
- “Sci Fi Anime: From Cyberpunk to Steampunk.” Anime: a Critical Introduction, by Rayna Denison, Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 40–41.
- Katsuhiro Otomo. “Akira Vol 1-6”. Kodansha Comics/Dark Horse Comics. 1982 -1990.
- Osamu Tezuka. “Metropolis”. Kodansha Comics/ Dark Horse Comics. 1949.
Filmography
- Akira. Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo. 1989. Film
- Metropolis. Dir. Rintaro. 2001. Film
