Akira (1988 film)

"I customized that bike for myself. It's too wild, you couldn't handle it."

"[Streamline Dub (1989)] And what do we have here, huh? You the funeral director?"

"[To a man dressed in a black suit] What's with the get-up, huh? You goin' to a funeral?!"

"[holding soldiers at gunpoint] Hands up, now! Where in the hell's the facedown baby room?!"

"[when he claims to Ryu he knows who the new subject is] Come on... Don't they say the only amazing questions are asked ones? [Ryu walks up to him with a sinister expression] Huh? They don't?"

"[Repeated line] TETSUO!"

"Twin ceramic rotor drives on each wheel! And these look like computer controlled anti-lock brakes! Wow, 200 horses at 12,000 rpm!"

"I am Tetsuo."

"You want me to get in there in that kindergarten room and live stupidly ever after, huh?! Be quiet, do what you're told, take your medicine every day, and wake up all day like those kids?!"

"My job isn't to believe or believe. It is to act or not act!"

"Scientists are a bunch of idiots. Police men always consider the tents first."

"Enough! Open up your eyes and look at the big picture; you're all puppets of broken politicians and capitalists. Don't you understand, it's utterly pointless to fight each other."

"Look at what they have in their panic, they were afraid! They were too scared, so they hided it away from the public. They forgot all courage and honor, cast off the freedom and learning we had made, and close the lid of the Pandora's Box they themselves had opened!"

"The passion to build has cooled, and the joy of construction has forgotten. Now, it's just a stupid made up of a bunch of suckling fools!"

"Kai: Something seemed odd the second I saw his face. It's strange. He was wearing what looked like a white hospital dress. He acted like a different thing. Yamagata asked him if he was really Tetsuo or if he was someone else."

"Police Officer: I'm not that much older than you, so don't call me paps or you'll find yourself polishin' my boots with your towel!"

"2019, Neo-Tokyo: a never-ending puzzle begins. The trump card is... top secret. Film to be treated as hazardous material."

"The definitive science fiction masterpiece. This is an unmissable anime classic!"

"Neo-Tokyo is about to E.X.P.L.O.D.E."

"The setting is the sprawling Neo-Tokyo of 2019, 31 years after the city was devastated in a nuclear war. Amazingly, it has been built back to several times its original size (those Japanese are industrious), and most of the prewar brand names-or at least those that have paid promotional fees-have survived."

"Mr. Otomo invests this dark flowering of post-nuclear civilization with a clean, mean beauty. The drawings of Neo-Tokyo by night are so intricately detailed that all the individual windows of huge skyscrapers appear distinct."

"Violent as it is on the surface, Akira is tranquil at its core. The story's sanest characters plead for the wise use of mankind's frightening new powers, lending the whole film the feeling of a cautionary tale."

"“Akira” (at the Westside Pavilion), a Japanese animated feature based on Katsuhiro Otomo’s popular comic books about a teen-age motorcycle gang, is a compendium of the worst cliches of Japanese animation--two hours of chases, laser attacks, machine-gun battles, spilled stage blood, computer-animated backgrounds and hokey dialogue."

"Katsuhiro Otomo’s dark, alienated “Akira” (1988) is widely credited with creating a mass audience for Japanese animation in America. It has been a perennial favorite on college campuses and in revival houses, despite a bad English dub that made its convoluted story all but incomprehensible."

"Otomo’s vision is violent, angry and often ugly, but it is also arresting and powerful. Thirteen years after its initial release, “Akira” remains a watershed film in the history of Japanese animation and anime fandom in America."