Most strikingly of all, the film is bathed in the harsh brilliance of a post-Einsteinian consciousness -- an awareness of both the horrors and the wonders of the uncharted worlds beyond the atom.

The hard-edged animation style is crudely inventive in the way of a fast-paced video game, but it's also very repetitive and boring. Like junk food, a little bit of it goes a long way.

It's a vision of the future that is at once startlingly imaginative and frighteningly like urban life as we know it today, poised on a new millenium.

If you could take crystallized essences of Heavy Metal, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Speed Racer and Tron, encase them in a kaleidoscope, focus and gaze, maybe you'd get some idea of Akira's brilliance.