Hirotsugu Kawasaki's animated actioner Spriggan comes by its Akira imitation honestly, thanks to the "general supervision and screen-story structure" credit given to Akira writer-director Katsuhiro Otomo. But some of the parallels between the two anime films are still a bit excessive. Spriggan's Indiana Jones-faces-Armageddon plot centers on a gigantic relic (assumed to be Noah's Ark) discovered on Turkey's Mount Ararat. ARCAM, a worldwide secret society dedicated to burying precisely this sort of ancient, powerful artifact, takes over the site, but comes into conflict with a team of evil American cyborgs with dubious motivations and even more dubious loyalties. One of those cyborgs, unfortunately for everyone, attempts to settle an old personal vendetta by drawing Japan's top ARCAM agent into the fray. For the most part, this setup is just an obligatory framework for fast-moving, eye-popping setpieces involving chases, gunfights, cyborg-vs.-superagent duels, and a staggeringly Akira-like final confrontation between a blue-skinned, telekinetic child and a gutsy, well-armed teenager who's too dumb to die. Spriggan wears its impressive budget firmly on its sleeve; the elaborate animation and constant fluid motion are much more of a draw than the stock characters. A chase through a Turkish market, punctuated with sporadic hand-to-hand combat, achieves a loose, flowing quality of character motion not seen since Ralph Bakshi's rotoscoping days; it even manages a convincing handheld-camera effect that gives the sequence a strikingly immediate feel. Other scenes, including a lengthy series of battles atop Ararat and a chilling exploration of the Ark, are less vérité-convincing but equally beautiful. American ADR director Matt Greenfield has done an unusually impressive job of voice casting; 12-year-old Kevin Corn is particularly credible as the eerie American agent Colonel Mac Dougall, a parallel to Akira's aged but time-frozen child-psychics. But the English dub script (which, as Greenfield explains in a tech-heavy audio commentary, had to be written phonetically to match Spriggan's unusually precise animated lip-synching) overemphasizes arrogant bravado, giving the film a shallower, slicker cowboy-combat feel than the Japanese subtitles suggest. Not that that's out of place for what's essentially an impressively animated summer popcorn movie, copious explosions and all.