Group A - Post 3: Akira - The Past, 1988, the Future, and the Music That Ties Them All Together - Brandon Ince

 

         Akira. Where to start with Akira. It's one of those phenomenons that comes around only once in lifetime. Lucky for me it came around before my lifetime even started so looks like I'm slated for at least one more of these course altering occurrences. For the uninitiated Akira is a 1988 film written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo based off a manga of the same name. Set in a distorted, cyberpunk, near future version of Tokyo, the story follows disgruntled youth Shotaro Kaneda as he tries to navigate his way through this mad world that seems to be falling apart at every seam three steps ahead of him. Akira was a highly ambitious film, with the goal to equal the quality put forth by the original 2,000 page epic, the film was allotted a budget of over one-billion yen which was outrageous for the time. The investment paid off, as the film is cited on regular occasion as one of the greatest animated films of all time. In a time of notoriously "lazy" animation, where characters were wont to only move with the absolute minimal amount of motion necessary, Akira dared to explode with highly dynamic and complex motion. From detailed facial animations to surprisingly deep animated foreground/background interplay - Akira had it all and then some. As complex as it's animation was, it pales in comparison to the complexity of the themes. Drug abuse, genetic engineering, religion, civil unrest, political corruption, the meaning of life, spirituality, the concept of the unknown, the consequence of messing with the unknown - a handful of intriguing themes to be sure, however the one we'll be focusing on in this post is the concept of the past, present, and future and how Akira communicates this idea not through its story - but its music.

         The music in Akira was composed by Shoji Yamashiro, (though his real name is Tsutomu Ohashi) and sought to incorporate musical sensibilities appropriate all to 1988, the dystopian futuristic world that Otomo had crafted, and finally the human condition. The act of weaving all of these airy/amorphous concepts together into and intuitive piece of music presents a quandry of immense difficulty to Yamashiro, the composer. It's almost like being handing a bag of blank jigsaw puzzle pieces and being told to assemble it "wastefully" - whatever that means. The tall order had been set so how did Yamashiro choose to solve this dilemma? Through a clever use of instrumentation and a restricted set of musical guidelines.

       The instrumentation used in Akira is a mixture of both ethnic and contemporary, but tends to lean more on the ethnic side, choosing to implement the use of a gamelan as opposed to a traditional orchestra. A gamelan is a ten-twenty piece Balinese percussion ensemble utilizing a set of exotic and base instruments. For example, one such instrument is what's known as a Jegog, which looks like a wide apparatus with halves of bamboo "keys" lined up ascending in size and timbre from one to the next, not too unlike an oversized marimba. When struck with a rubber mallet the instrument produces a low, resonant, wooden sound. A little unimpressive on its own but when multiple jegogs are played in unison the sound takes on a primal quality, awakening some fire deep inside that had long ago been locked up.

        This fire is the key to Yamashiro's success with the score, he tantalizes the very base components of human nature through his restrictive set of musical guidelines employed when composing for Akira. No matter what song they appear in the rhythm performed by the Jegog and the rest of the gamelan ensemble always sticks to a modern sounding sixteen beat pattern. Four sets of four. This musical/rhthmatic form is the bread and butter for the very mass majority of songs ever composed by human hands. Yamashiro believes that "[the sixteen beat pattern] is a code programed into the DNA of humans. This code existed in the beginning and will exist in the future." This statement, albeit teetering on the side grandiose, has merit. No matter what creed or culture one comes from, we all seem to enjoy hearing our music in sets of four. It's one of those phenomenon that remains unexplained. It bridges not only human to human, but past to future as well.

         Through the mixture of primitive instrumentation and modern/primal music sensibilities Yamashiro is able to manipulate our sense of intuition and create a musical experience that feels unlike anything we've felt before while also being so familiar you can smell it. The rhythm is composed with a modern audience in mind so it feels familiar, but it's played on an exotic instrument that sounds like no other so it also sounds primal and distant. When you mix these two contradictory feelings together your left with something bizarre - which could be the most important component in Yamashiro's genius solution to thematically bridge the gap between the past, the present, and an uncanny future. Through music its possible to connect "the dots" in a way that pictures or words simply cannot. As long as there are human conditions to explore, there will be music composed along to capture it.

Otomo, Katsuhiro, director. Akira Sound Clip . Funimation, 2013.