AKIRA

Beautiful animation, a mystical soundtrack and a stunning story that was condensed into a wonderful movie! Akira is one of the best anime films of all time and for many good reasons. This is a must watch film for me! The version I watched for this review was the 2001 Pioneer Dvd release so please take this next part with a grain of salt if you have a different version. The story is wonderful and dramatic, but the blocks of tough vocab alone is not the main enemy here - it is the original Japanese voice audio quality which is of significantly lower quality than more modern works. The original audio may be remastered in other editions which might make it better, but I found it tough to follow in spots, too much muddying in the speech which is realistic but not what many people are used to in anime. The toughest bits are particularly in large chaotic crowd scenes and Lady Miyako's speech in particular. Accurate parsing of the words and some of the tough vocab makes this significantly harder than things like Final Fantasy Advent Children and Death Note which have much clearer audio.

Having seen this in English many years ago, I had an advantage and did not use subs (nor were they included in the Pioneer release) - but still it was amazing experience to hear all so much more than what the English version gave us. In many ways - Akira is a masterpiece worthy to be reexperienced in its original language as intended even though the English dub was exceptional for its era (and still is good even now).