Akira and Ranma 1/2: The Monstrous Adolescent

Abstract

Despair and feeling of entrapment are emotions often associated with adolescence. They are also frequently emotions projected onto the adolescent body, an object that becomes the site of a welter of contradictory feelings, from tremulous hope to savage disappointment. This chapter discusses two forms of the representation of the adolescent body in Japanese animation, the confused and terrifying figure of Tetsuo in Otomo Katsuhiro’s 1988 tour de force Akira and the confused and comic figure of Ranma in the popular late 1980s and early 1990s television series Ranma 1/2. Although very different from each other in style and tone, both texts privilege the notion of the adolescent body as a site of metamorphosis, a metamorphosis that can appear monstrous both to the figure undergoing it and to the outside world. What makes the two works fundamentally different, however, is the protagonists’ basic attitudes toward metamorphosis. In the case of Tetsuo, he sometimes resists the transformation but also at times nihilistically glories in it, and ultimately asserts his monstrous new identity unflinchingly at the film’s end. Ranma’s reaction to his transforming body is very different. He continually denies it, searching for a return to “normality” that is forever comically (but perhaps for him tragically) elusive.