|  Drugs are illegal and dangerous, and not to mention hard on the budget. But there is a cheaper and easier way to trip -- to have a whacked out experience that will blow your mind. All you got to do is go down to your local video store and pick up a copy of the anime classic Akira.
The description on the back will tell you it is an adventure story about some guys in a biker gang who get into some monkey shines. Yeah right.
This is peyote in your DVD player. You’ll start off kind of following events like biker gang rivalry and the undertow of a group of terrorists rebels. Then, just when you’ve settled into your couch waiting for the formulaic plot to unfold -- for the happy ending -- you will think you have gone crazy. There’s a little blue kid with a wrinkly face that breaks glass when he screams.
“Who’s that?” you might wonder.
Then a host of spaceships come down to take him away. He’s an alien who escaped? Guess again. A wrinkly, blue invalid version of Louie Anderson is riding a flying wheelchair that sits in a protective force bubble.
"Is he an alien too? That same species?"
You got to stop thinking and enjoy the ride here. The shit’s going to get heavy and you just got to roll with it. This kid called Tetsuo ran his motorbike into the blue kid -- the first one, not Louie Anderson, former host of Family Feud -- so he is hospitalized and taken to the place where the blue kids stay. There’s another blue kid, and she looks the oldest. She strongly resembles a corpse but is confined to a crib and has an annoying voice like nails scratching against the rim of your eardrums. You see, these kids all have psychic powers, and so does Tetsuo now, now that he crashed into one of them and the fire of the explosion awoke some innate power that all of us have -- even slugs. Tripping, tripping. So the government has to keep him and experiment on him. Of course.
This mad scientist that looks eerily like the villain from Mega Man is constantly examining Tetsuo's brain flow chart that looks like some spinning rainbow thing that Pink Floyd probably has in their basement. It spins and changes colors and the shape is like a warped crown. Staring, tripping. It’s cool, let the hallucinations come naturally. Tetsuo’s friends, including a guy named Kaneda, try to free him.
"Okay, I think I got the gist of the movie, I’m following it, this is fine."
No, don’t get all cocky, I haven’t said anything about the teddy bear. Sit back and get all whacked out.
Tetsuo is getting a bunch of powers at once, and it is driving him crazy. So when a teddy bear the size of a lighter starts saying “Hello” to him, you aren’t that surprised. But then, the room tilts -- the bear and other stuffed animals start flying and talking. Tetsuo is screaming and then all the toys are gigantic. There is a rabbit, an anthropomorphic car with gnarly teeth and a teddy bear all scraping their heads against the ceiling and looking mighty vicious as they start to attack Tetsuo. They start leaking out milk and groaning and the room is off kilter and... you’re feeling it now aren’t you? And this only cost you $3.25! Turns out the giant self-milking toys are really the blue kids trying to kill Tetsuo before he gets too powerful. When Tetsuo cuts his foot they all start squealing “BLOOD! I’m scared!” like the annoying little brats they are. And they walk through the melting, Dali-style wall, leaving gushing milk all over the floor and that’s the end of the scene.
 Drink some water, stay cool man, this is all kind of all heavy, can you dig it? Quite a buzz, huh? Tetsuo escapes and becomes mad with power. He can do anything, man. He can push a bullet back with his brain, he can fly, he can turn the concrete below him into a bologna sandwich and he loves it. He starts to kill everyone and destroy everything and laugh and laugh and laugh. It is up to Kaneda to stop him, so he shoots him with a bazooka.
“What do you want, Tetsuo?” he screams in dubbed English or in street urchin Japanese with English subtitles typed out on the bottom of your screen.
“I want to find Akira who is the most powerful little blue kid ever because I want to challenge him. So I am going to rip open the Olympic Stadium and find him and kill him.”
Meanwhile the guy from Mega Man is watching the brain waves and getting off on it. The rainbow crown spins and changes shape and “This is amazing! Fantastic! I can’t believe it!” Colors, spinning, tripping.
 Tetsuo does rip open the stadium and kills without forethought and tears up the stadium some more. But Akira is dead -- too bad, Tetsuo! He is just a bunch of separate parts in jars. He looks like a science project, like potatoes floating in brine. And now the power is too much and it is transforming Tetsuo’s hand into a thousand fat hands made of j-e-l-l-o. And his body is expanding like dough, choking Kaneda, his best friend once. He’s turning into a tree, a glob, a monster. As this shape-changing fest goes on and on, take it all in. Let the inexplicable images stir the back of your mind, this is mind expansion, friend. Mega Man, the brain waves, whoo! The blue kids are back as ghosts or astral projections, and are whiny. They resurrect the spirit of Akira and have flashbacks of their elementary school for psychic, freakish blue-faced kids who look like senior citizens. Akira rises up and is light itself; he is the air and Tetsuo is collapsing. The rainbow crown is spinning. Remember that one day you will have flashbacks of this. Then Tetsuo explodes and the universe inverts. The other big bang. The galaxy is now made up a bunch of lines and circles moving toward the screen. A screensaver is what life itself is reduced to. Trippy.
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