Akira is worshipped by many as the best anime film ever made, but I'm not alone in thinking it's a pretty bad film in everything it does except for its animation. So why am I writing this? I recently watched Tenchi Muyou in Love, not a particularly impressive film story-wise, but I joked to myself whilst watching, "Akira wishes it looked this good", but I realised that there are some actual reasons as to why Tenchi Muyou is more visually appealing to me than Akira . Nobody seems willing to be critical of Akira's visuals, I think people are afraid to be seen as criticising what is objectively technically impressive animation, but fluid animation and high production values does not necessarily mean it looks good. Tenchi Muyou in Love is a sequel to a 90s TV anime, hardly known for their high production budgets, yet surprised me with its visual presentation.
I think Tenchi Muyou's biggest strength is its beautiful background artwork and the subtle ways that it creates visual depth. Perhaps the impressiveness of these factors is enhanced due to the existence of a preceding TV series which for almost the entire first half takes place in the immediate vicinity of the protagonist's house in the middle of nowhere, demanding little from the background artists. Additionally, as much as I love the 4:3 aspect ratio of 90s TV anime, Tenchi Muyou in Love achieves the visual depth it does by fully utilising widescreen. For example, multi planing with an out of focus object immediately in front of the camera but offset to the left to create depth. The unobstructed part of the screen contains all the necessary information in a space that, in 4:3, would fill the entire screen. Characters are also permitted to move not just horizontally or vertically, but through the scene. See example below.
Akira's use of multi planing was not as impressive, particularly in the opening sequence of the cityscape with overhead roads scrolling past, yes I know there wasn't really any other way of achieving this look, but this is also a limited animation technique that was being used by TV anime at the time. Tenchi Muyou also uses varying degrees of closeup or fisheye perspectives. The point I'm trying to make here is that while Akira is able to clutter the screen with loads of visual detail, it manages to be a fairly flat looking film. Conversely, Tenchi Muyou has comparatively little going on beyond the detailed background and the expressive characters on top, but this likely made the use of interesting perspective techniques easier. If it hadn't done this then yes, I would consider Akira's extra detail superior.
There is an certain uncaniness to Akira's characters, I don't think there is necessarily anything wrong with the designs themselves but I think there is a clash between the "realistic" designs and a virtually unlimited animation budget which would give them capacity for far more expressiveness if they were somewhat more conventionally "anime" styled. Human emotion is largely conveyed through subtle facial expressions which can be hard to capture in animated form, which is where unrealistic and stylised designs that sometimes break the rules come into play. Akira's characters particularly struggle with eye expression, which is troublesome given that we as humans are inclined to focus on the eyes when someone is talking. To compensate for this, the characters in Akira seem to wildly flail their heads around to create emotion or expression, but this betrays the realistic art style of said characters! Their black beady eyes move around but they don't seem to dilate, something which Tenchi Muyou's characters with their large eyes are able to achieve despite not being realistic! I know that in animation, more frames is almost always better, but I think Akira is possibly the lone example of something that is over-animated! Conversations between people in real life often have little going on visually other than the movement of their mouths and their facial reactions, with arm expressions sometimes coming into play. Even if I was particularly angry or empassioned whilst speaking, I would mostly express this through arm movements and not throwing my head around (Akira does the arm movement bit to its credit). The problems I have with how Akira's characters are handled visually makes perfect sense of course considering that they were designed for a manga and not for the most fluid anime ever produced.
It goes without saying that Tenchi Muyou in Love isn't exactly a groundbreaking film, but I thought it was a good candidate for dunking on Akira, it is absolutely the underdog of this comparison and I imagine the budget for Akira was many times more yet Tenchi Muyou is a film I enjoy looking at and Akira is not. Hopefully I won't ever have the displeasure of watching Akira for a third time, watching it a second time was bad enough as it beat out Patlabor and Nausicaa in a vote! Notice how I've not included any images of Akira here? It's because it's not worth your bandwidth!
