Princess Mononoke was my Akira

So I had never seen Akira before last week, but the way that I have always heard Akira talked about was by older animation fans or people who come from a kind of nerdy subculture who saw it for the first time when it was initially brought to the US. They all talk about it like it was a life changing experience, and that it changed the way that they thought about animation and what it could be. There is a part of me that would have loved to have been one of those people who got to see Akira in 1989 when there was nothing else really like it available in the US. Clearly that would have been a totally different experience than watching it in park aud in 2018, but I do think that I had something similar when I first saw Miyazaki’s films. I remember I was kind of terrified of Spirited Away as a kid, so that didn’t impact me much initially except to give me nightmares, but I watched Princess Mononoke when I was a little bit older, and I think it was a similar experience to watching Akira in 1989 in the sense that I had never seen anything like it before. After seeing Akira it’s crazy to see how similar the two films actually are, from the opening on a chase scene, to the “cursed” arms of Tetsuo and Ashitaka, to the final scene of the film where this huge god-like entity starts eating the world. I think the films have very different messages, and that’s ultimately the reason why I’m glad I got Mononoke over Akira. Mononoke just speaks to me more, with the focus on nature and spirituality and the characters being the way that they are. Also, I know they were made ten years apart, but the female representation is so much better in Mononoke? Like leaps and bounds ahead of Akira, which is something that's really important to me in films. I don't think it's necessary to pick one over the other like I'm doing right now, but I've just been trying to figure out how I can like one and not the other when they share so much?