The plot isn't as good as the artwork, unfortunately.  It's got at least a dozen scenes where the viewer will think, "Oh please." so you have to actively disengage your internal logic-o-meter to really enjoy the film.  The characters aren't bad, if a bit cliché, but it's the action that sells things. And the action is great, mostly for the scale of destruction.

There is destruction and death here on a level I've never before seen in a movie.  Not that war films don't have higher body counts, but in Akira there are numerous scenes with buildings collapsing, bridges buckling and plunging into the water, bombs going off, etc, and every time you can almost count the individual bricks or bullets.  The drawing is incredibly clear and detailed in the destruction, and as walls crumble, floors give way, and people dangle from a collapsing bridge, other people pulling them up to dubious safety, you can see everything.

The scale of action increases steadily also, as some of the characters gain more and more super psychic powers, and start launching mind blasts that rip through entire buildings, stop lasers, engulf tank missiles, battle death rays from space, mutate into 50 story blobs, and more.  I'm making none of this up, I assure you.

The imagination of things is amazing also, with characters having very vivid fantasies as they are freaking out from their growing psychic powers.  One awesome scene features stuffed animals coming to life, growing to be 20 feet tall and looking very scary as they destroy a hospital room and try to kill one character.  That's not a great example, but while watching it I frequently found myself amazed at how clever and creative the events and animation were.

This all sounds better than it is, since I'm only mentioning the high spots.  The dubbed voices are okay, but the dialogue is really dumb.  Lots of shouting and 98% of the speech is entirely to advance the plot, and is quite often unnecessary, since it's almost providing a play by play of the visuals.  When someone is destroying the city or being shot, we don't really need another character yelling about how he's destroying the city or being shot.

It does have very good sound effects and music though, and like all anime, has epic scenes and motivations and events.  It's the smaller stuff that doesn't work so well.  Most of the characters are very clever and not at all stock, but the things they do are pretty obvious.  I think a lot of the problem is either the translation, or else the original dialogue.  The visuals are always far better than what's being said, and a good script doctor could improve the movie greatly by tightening up the jabber and making the conversations much more realistic.

There are a lot of ways the movie could be better, mostly in terms of character action and motivation, and it's illogical at times, with a relatively unsatisfying conclusion, but overall it's certainly worth watching.  You'll want to watch at least half of it again, just to see the animation and destruction that goes on at times, and it's definitely the best-animated Anime to date, in technical terms.  Miyazaki has better scenes, and of course far better writing and directing, but his drawing is more fairy tale or impressionistic, while Akira strives for photographic representation, and does a pretty good job of pulling it off.

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