What survives of Akira’s cyberpunk

Akira accomplishes 35 yearscompared to five years ago there is one more way to spoil the party: pronounce the number resulting from the year in which the story of the anime is set plus 30. Much has been said and written about the cyberpunk sci-fi masterpiece, especially on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary, celebrated, among other things, with a return to the cinema. New lap, new race: on 14 and 15 March Akira is in Italian cinemas, respectively in the original version with subtitles and dubbed in Italian. What the articles published in 2018 clearly ignored is how the collective perception of the work of Katsuhiro Otomoalso author of manga, in the five years up to 2023. An assessment cannot ignore the context and the context seems to me that of a growth, in terms of popularity, of cyberpunk science fiction, thanks to some important releases. Some works rather than others have taken advantage of this phenomenon, always in terms of attention measured on large portions of the public. Akira it could be among the latter, accentuating its characteristics as a generational film year after year.

Speaking of cyberpunk science fiction: it was assumed that we would try, it was never sure that we would succeed. By “we” I mean “we millennials”, who over time have seen our ability to influence the choices of the cultural industry grow, both from within and in terms of demand. This partly explains the return of the 1980s, and therefore of the hyper-coded science fiction sub-genre which, born in the 1980s, acted as a counterpoint to Thatcherite and Reagan liberalism. If I say that a return of cyberpunk it wasn’t obvious, it’s because the first attempts to pierce the imaginary barrel of neon and ideograms have, sometimes unexpectedly, failed: Altered Carbon, the very expensive 2018 Netflix series, held out for two seasons, then was canceled. Probably at Netflix the calculations had been made up Blade Runner 2049, at the cinema a year earlier. However, the launch pad was broken: Villeneuve’s film seemed highly anticipated, then it was understood that it was only highly anticipated from the bubble. If you’ve been to the cinema, you’ve probably seen three generations in particular: from millennials to boomers. The impression, in this first phase, is that we were singing and playing it alone, we who have seen battleships on fire off the ramparts of Orion.

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Flash forward: on TikTok a girl in her early twenties imitates the ballet by Ana De Armas in Blade Runner 2049, a song by Doja Cat plays in the background. It’s not the only trend borrowed from Villeneuve’s courageous sequel. Another is built on a quote: “You look lonely… i can fix that”. The gigantic pink hologram with the features of the Cuban actress says it, while pointing the finger at Ryan Gosling with a plaster stuck on his nose (and his heart is even worse). “I can fix that” becomes jargon, and every jargon exists as a function of a group: here, however, the group is very numerous and retains characteristics of self-referentiality only in the vast sea of ​​the internet. Anyone who says “I can fix that” knows the quote, as well as those who give the video a like and those who comment on it, at least in principle. When it reaches a certain extent, slang gives rise to episodes of detachment and if it rises even more in the collective awareness it self-destructs in a level up that transforms it into common language: surely someone will have lost sight of the starting point, but the fact that TikTok make use of 2049 to fuel one’s mythology is relevant. The sequel to Blade Runner it is also interesting for how it travels on the internet with strokes of memesquotations and variations on the theme, with new meanings, to put it in a not very smart and youthful way.

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One last digression before going back to the bomb Akira: every cultural phenomenon must pass through a video game and the interactive multimedia work set in an open world bathed in neon and rain and squeezed between dizzying skyscrapers is called Cyberpunk 2077. As the most anticipated game of 2020, CD Projekt’s debuted as a resounding failure, then was fixed piece by piece (and according to some never completely). It was noticed that it got better after the release of an anime from the Trigger studio, Edgerunners, set in the same universe, which has rekindled the spotlight on the starting point. Videos on TikTok? Of course, many, also in this case, for at least two and a half billion views. This avalanche of content resulted in the birth of a hit: it’s about I really want to stay at your house by Rosa Walton, recurring musical score and soundtrack piece by 2077.

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1752 video games on the Steam digital store have the “cyberpunk” label, among these there is one with a cat that will also be talked about in orbit among astronauts aboard the ISS, released last summer with the name of Stray. Google searches confirm what I’ve tried to demonstrate so far: peaking in December 2020, release date of 2077, the search keyword “cyberpunk” has never reached values ​​lower than pre-2018, even for overlapping searches between cyberpunk (genre) and cyberpunk (video game). The peaks suggest that the first meaning is drowned in the second, this also tells us something. It would seem that the cyberpunk pie is getting bigger and bigger, but so is the slice of Akira

has grown less than others.

On Letterboxd. the Goodreads of movies, 464 thousand users have added Akira to watched, while 1.11 million did the same with Blade Runner 2049 (which is also seen more than the prequel, stopped at 977 thousand). On TV Time, another movie social network, Akira has been added to the watchlist by 56 thousand users, Blade Runner 2049 from 264 thousand. At the time of writing, Otomo’s work is in place number 2031 among the most popular films on IMDB, Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling instead snatch a surprising, for a 2017 film, 145th position. Then there is the inevitable TikTok: i videos with hashtag Akira garnered 1.2 billion views, those with #bladerunner2049 instead 903 million. However, the first label represents an umbrella under which multiple types of content fall (Akira is a personal name), the second is specific to the film. This of course depends on whether the live action work directly informs some successful trends, but if a Wednesday it’s not spring then I’ll also put a M3gan is one Stranger Things to argue that there is a correlation, probably bidirectional, between the success of a film or series in real life and its presence on a platform that exploded in 2021, therefore more useful for our discussion, because it still bears the imprint of a recent past. The same can be said of Letterboxd, which has been around since 2011 but has doubled its number of accounts during the pandemic.

On a creative level we will never let go of the power of Akira as long as we continue to talk about cyberpunk, Otomo’s being the second historical pillar on which a very conservative aesthetic rests, so rigid and defined that it almost stops being itself if we try to change a thing or two (matrix is it cyberpunk?). I reviewed Akira after playing Cyberpunk 2077 and I noticed that the entrance to the bar where we meet Kaneda is exactly the same as the entrance to a club in Night City (below is a photo of my avatar with his gang, actually NPCs that I approached without knowing them only for the photo opportunity).

Another literal reference to Akira exists in Cyberpunks in the form of the protagonist’s motorbike, carried bodily from one work to another. This is an insignificant marketing operation, just as a 1:1 quote could only be the developers’ wink at gamers who share the same cultural background. Actually Akira is part of Cyberpunk 2077 even on a more substantial level, just take a ride (even on a motorcycle) in Night City. The architecture and urban planning they follow the trend of Neo Tokyo: there are the dilapidated and uninhabited neighborhoods of the outer wall, full of free zones and garbage, out of the reach of the government like urban forests where you can get lost and never be found again. There are elevated ones like the one in which more than one scene of the anime is set, which slip between the skyscrapers of the centre, the place of choice for hip little bars full of wealthy customers, of the same human type as those at the restaurant in the motorcycle scene of Akira. Over the past five years, Kaneda’s scuffing on the bike has added at least Nope to the dozens of tributes in as many films and series, some of which lined up in a rather famous video.

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All of this is evidence that, however much it may slip away from the collective consciousness, theoutput of Akira at Cinema it was like adding a spoonful of orange juice to the full glass of water that used to be cyberpunk: separating the two is now impossible.

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It will be interesting to understand how much Blade Runner 2049 And Cyberpunk 2077, which according to the latest figures in September sold 20 million copies, will be able to sculpt the collective imagination in their own image and likeness, at least for a while. The second is continuously updated and CD Projekt has announced a series of side projects: an expansion with Idris Elba is coming in 2023, a sequel in the next few years, with the provisional title of Project Orion. 2049 he will have to demonstrate that he has managed to go beyond the round of memes and quotations, influencing the creatives of the future and creating non-extemporaneous contaminations, without detracting from his temporary result. New technologies, events, debates, aesthetics, in short, a new spirit of the times will have to be codified to periodically update one of the darkest segments of science fiction. Akira it is now part of that heritage, and we rightly celebrate it by going to the cinema with religious devotion. For the rest, who knows: shall we meet at the 40th anniversary celebration?