Tomorrow, a particular movie is turning 35 years old since its Japanese-only silver screen debut, one that is often brought up by both critics and general animation fans as one of the cyberpunk forntrunners that has done the heavy lifting in popularizing Eastern animation all around the world in the late 80ies.
Thanks to an exclusive-licenses-affine Taiko no Tatsujin game, even Donders all across the globe have their own way to revisit part of its legacy, which is also why I'm talking about it today!
KANEDA
「Symphonic Suite AKIRA」より
| Game | Genre |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PTB |
 |
★2 (109) |
★4 (174) |
★5 (373) |
★7 (496) |
- |
120
kanedaThe momentous release of the movie Akira on June 16th, 1988, surely meant more than the flowery introduction I've given on the intro even for the audiences of back then, considering the shocking estimates of around 700 million Yen that were spent for its making and the incredible box office reception with about 50 million dollars worldwide, numbers that -for the time- were mostly unheard of!
Based on the eponymous 1982 manga from mangaka-turned-screenwriter/movie director Katsuhiro Otomo (大友克洋), it's set in the midst of a world war-plagued that started from a sudden explosion that has wiped out the city of Tokyo, over 30 years prior the story's setting in the future of 2019. There, we follow the hot-headed Shōtarō Kaneda, leader of a vigilante motorcycle gang called the Capsules, into what is becoming of the newly-established Neo-Tokyo, between the power struggles of political/military complex tensions and the mysterious yet destructive psychic power that his childhood friend Tetsuo Shima has acquired after a crashing accident into an esper, woven into laying waste to the city with his telekinetic abilities in a search for a mysterious entity named "Akira" that allegedly caused the old Tokyo's destruction in 1988. Being realized before the Akira manga's run end of June 1990, the Toho movie accomodates its original story and characters while offering plotlines that diverge from the original printed run's.
Akira's worldwide popularity has managed to become as prolific a Japan's due to the eager localization project of both the movie and the manga run, the latter happening via Marvel Comics' Epic imprint and eventually becoming one of the first mangas to receive a commercially-available, complete English translation. The influence it had on the general animation world can surely be felt as a casual media-consuming bystander, when many a mangaka/animator have eagerly offered their nods to one iconic motorcycle drift from the movie -the fan-dubbed 'Akira Slide'- in many a work across the years, and not just limited to Eastern Animation (or even animation at all!). Akira managed to score a couple of games across the years -one for NES from Taito and a Ps2 pinball sim called Akira Psycho Ball- and the production of a live action rendition of its story is even being considered by Warner Bros. since the early 00s, a project that unfortunately has been put on hold for an indefinite time period.
The advent of Akira music in Taiko gaming is quite the singularity among licensed picks too, as its subtitle doesn't reference the source TV show/movie it's based off but rather the title of its related sountrack release, 1988's Symphonic Suite AKIRA that premiered on July 27th on vinyl and cassette tapes, finding its way to CDs and further vinyl releases as part of anniversary-tied rereleases across the years. The Akira movie's score is entirely created by Tsutomu Ōhashi (大橋力), an agriculturalscientist who also worked as a composer under the art name of Shoji Yamashiro (山城 祥二). Ohashi's musical collective known as Genioh Yamashirogumi (芸能山城組), founded in 1974 and consisting of literal hundreds of people across they years of many a non-music-related working occupation, banding together to bring life to folk music fond to Indonesian amelan and the Japanese performing-arts classical music renditions of noh with both the percussions/winds of the past and the synthesisers of the (then) rising day.
Step right into KANEDA's Oni chart in order to be brought back to the 7-to-14 Taiko arcade charting generation of no-hybrid clusters to hit, coupled by the more laid-back BPM pace that really lends itself to give more power to each of the player's own percussions into the Taiko chart.
