The Ontology of Violence in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira

Katsuhiro Otomo’s film Akira is well-known for its excessive imagery and themes of violence. This article attempts to extrapolate a general ontology of violence by bringing the film in dialogue with contemporary theorists of violence such as Garry W. Trompf, Slavoj Žižek, Bernard Stiegler, and Peter Sloterdijk. It will be argued that violence and creativity may be ontologically two sides of the same coin. Akira illustrates this dialectical tension from all levels. Firstly, from the historical level, the dialectic of violence and creativity can be discerned in Otomo’s double-sided critique of Imperial Japan and Japan’s post-war economic construction into a capitalist nation. Secondly, the ontology of creation-destruc­tion is embodied within the antagonist Tetsuo and the metaphysical energy called “Akira.” Here, the author will draw a clear parallel between Tetsuo’s perverse caricature of Superman with the Nietzschean Übermensch. Finally from the meta-level, it is expressed in the conflicting usage of the film’s score and the very success of the anime despite being one of the most violent animated film of all times. In many ways, the creation-destruction ontology developed here from Akira will cast a different light on other problems pertaining to violence and creativity: the inherent confusion of modern subjectivity, our ambivalent relation to technology, systemic violence and terrorism.