Short answers, pulled from the story.
Katsuhiro Otomo agreed to adapt his manga into an animated film only after securing a guarantee of total creative control. This condition stemmed from his previous negative experience working on the 1985 film Harmagedon where he felt sidelined by producers.
Toho released Akira in Japan on the 16th of July 1988 making it the sixth highest-grossing Japanese film of that year. The project moved forward through 1987 and early 1988 culminating in this specific release date.
The resulting project required a partnership known as the Akira Committee which pooled resources to fund a budget estimated at fifty million yen for production alone. This figure was unconventionally high for Japanese animation in the late 1980s and reflected the ambition to match the epic scale of Otomo's two thousand page source material.
Production began with pre-scored dialogue a technique rarely used in anime before this point allowing animators to move character lips to match the audio precisely. The team created over one hundred sixty thousand animation cels to achieve super-fluid motion that defined the film's kinetic energy.
In 2019 Neo-Tokyo exists as a scarred metropolis following the destruction of Tokyo on the 16th of July 1988. The city suffers from corruption anti-government protests terrorism and gang violence due to these events.