Akira
Every aspect of this was remarkable. I have not read the manga, I probably will after this, but as a standalone movie it's insane. The soundscape is desolate, ominous, and perfectly encapsulates every scene. Even better is when its silent; this is by far the most effective use of silence that I've ever seen.
The grasp on color here is something that I've only seen rivaled in Singing in the Rain and clips of Tarkovsky's works and Kurosawa's later works. Every color palette that could possibly be covered here is executed to absolute perfection. Grimy, dull, neutral tones really pull you in to disgust. Vast, magnificent cityscapes with vibrant colors. Destruction and body horror. There's so much here and it DOES NOT LET UP in visual quality.
The characters are cold and distant. We never really get to know them. I've seen many argue this is because it's compressing such an expansive work into a 2-hour movie and we don't get the same opportunity to know the characters that we do in the original manga. I'm sure this is true, but I think it also works in a sort of Yojimbo-esque way. We do not really know or root for the characters, we're more so being taken along the journey of what the writers stand for.
Yojimbo takes place in a town so crooked and corrupt that, despite not really ever knowing the main character, you are rooting for him to just tear the whole place down. Akira operates in a similar sort of way, but on the scale of a whole civilization. After World War III devastates Tokyo, Neo-Tokyo is the flawed, mutated rebirth that did not get the chance to fully recover. It is a wicked, vile, perverse, disgusting place, and once again, despite not having any warm and vivid characters to root for, you want it to all come down. It is the cry of a late-stage capitalist society begging to be put out of its misery. The collective and individual traumas of a writer and a generation that I cannot truly understand, but that I can get a lot closer to through a work like this.
I'll need a couple more watches to fully understand this, and the assistance of the manga, because it moves at an UNBELIEVABLE pace. It covers too much ground to keep up for the whole time; I felt kind of winded by the end. But GOD. It's fucking insane.