Akira (1988 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Akira exploded onto Japanese screens on the 16th of July 1988, the same date the film's own story marks as the day Tokyo was obliterated by a mysterious force. That symmetry was not accidental. Director Katsuhiro Otomo was adapting his own sprawling manga, a work still unfinished when cameras rolled, and he chose to set its fictional catastrophe on the very day his film would be born into the world.

  The film follows Shōtarō Kaneda, leader of a biker gang called the Capsules in the crumbling megalopolis of Neo-Tokyo. When his childhood friend Tetsuo Shima collides with a child esper during a night chase, something is unlocked inside Tetsuo that no government laboratory or military force can contain. What starts as a motorcycle accident cascades into a confrontation with psychic power, state secrecy, and the possibility that destruction is not a historical wound but a recurring condition.

  Akira would go on to earn over $80 million in worldwide home video sales. It would be credited with opening Western audiences to anime as a serious art form. It would be named as an influence on films from The Matrix to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and on musicians from Kanye West to Lupe Fiasco. But the story of how it got made, and why it still holds its grip, begins with an artist who called the whole endeavor "the worst possible idea" he ever agreed to.

• 2. Making the Impossible Film

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  Katsuhiro Otomo did not want to adapt Akira. He became, as he described it, "very intrigued" only when an offer was formally placed before him, and he agreed only on one condition: creative control. That condition was shaped directly by his earlier experience working on Harmagedon, a project where he had less authority over the final product.

  The budget required to match the scale of his more than 2,000-page manga was simply unprecedented for Japanese animation. A partnership of major entertainment companies, called the Akira Committee, was assembled specifically to fund it: Kodansha, Mainichi Broadcasting System, Bandai, Hakuhodo, Toho, LaserDisc Corporation, and Sumitomo Corporation all contributed money and promotional resources. The starting budget alone was around 500,000,000 yen.

  Otomo filled roughly 2,000 pages of notebooks with character designs and ideas during preproduction, but the final storyboard was trimmed to 738 pages. The finished film required more than 160,000 animation cels. Computer-generated imagery, produced by High-Tech Lab Japan Inc. alongside Sumisho Electronic Systems and Wavefront Technologies, was used to animate a pattern indicator in Doctor Onishi's laboratory, plot falling object trajectories, and model parallax effects on backgrounds.

  One production choice was genuinely without precedent in anime: the dialogue was recorded before animation began, so that characters' lip movements could be drawn to match the spoken lines rather than the reverse. Otomo later recalled the central difficulty of starting a film before its source manga had an ending. The inspiration for how to conclude the manga, he said, came from a conversation with filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. He worked backward from that ending, determining in reverse order which elements from the manga could survive the compression into a two-hour film.

• 3. A Score Unlike Any Other

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  Shoji Yamashiro, working under the pseudonym Tsutomu Ohashi, composed the Akira soundtrack and conducted its performance by the collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi. The score draws its primary textures from traditional Indonesian gamelan music and incorporates elements of Japanese noh music, two traditions that sit well outside the orchestral mainstream of film scoring.

  The soundtrack was recorded before the film was completed, consistent with Akira's pre-scored production approach. Tracks including "Kaneda," "Battle Against Clown," and "Exodus From the Underground Fortress" function as a single interconnected song cycle; elements of "Battle Against Clown" appear during the film's opening motorcycle sequence. The score was generally sequenced to follow the order in which music appears in the film.

  An alternate soundtrack release presented the music as it occurs in the film, with dialogue and sound effects included but arranged out of sequence. The music's reach extended beyond the film itself: samples from the Akira soundtrack appeared in hip hop and electronic tracks, and an album of electronica remixes by an artist called Bwana, titled Capsules Pride, was released drawing from the score.

• 4. What the Critics Heard

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  Tony Rayns, writing in The Monthly Film Bulletin at the time of release, described the film's narrative as operating at such "speed and complexity" that viewers arriving without knowledge of the manga would find it "almost overpowering." He concluded that the film "virtually demands to be 'read' alongside the manga, and amounts to a kind of commentary on it."

  Variety praised the film's imagination and its Dolby sound design while criticizing what it called a "slight stiffness in the drawing of human movement." Dave Kehr of the Chicago Tribune highlighted specific techniques: vehicles leaving color trails as they roar through the night, and dream sequences that exploit animation's capacity to "confound scale and distort perspective."

  Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised Otomo's artwork directly, writing that "the drawings of Neo-Tokyo by night are so intricately detailed that all the individual windows of huge skyscrapers appear distinct. And these night scenes glow with subtle, vibrant color." Roger Ebert compared the film to Mad Max, calling it "very gory, very gruesome, but entertaining in its own demented way," and later selected Akira as his Video Pick of the Week in 1992 on Siskel and Ebert and the Movies.

  Kim Newman of Empire commended the film's "scintillating animated visuals, with not one - not one - computer-assisted shot in sight." Helen McCarthy, writing in 500 Essential Anime Movies, argued that the film "remains fresh and exciting, easily holding its own against the products of two decades of massive technical advancement." Dan Persons of Cinefantastique, writing in February 2004, simply called Akira "the film that changed everything." On Rotten Tomatoes, it holds a 91% approval score based on 55 reviews.

• 5. Themes Scholars Found

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  Susan J. Napier, one of the most cited scholars on the film, links Akira's repeated imagery of catastrophic explosions to memories of the atomic bombings and to Cold War anxieties, arguing that the film treats disaster as something that can recur rather than as a singular historical wound. Thomas Lamarre similarly describes the film's approach to destruction as cyclical, with psychic power standing in for forces that society repeatedly fails to contain.

  Napier reads the film's government as one that "relies on force and secrecy, and where attempts to maintain order instead deepen instability." Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell add that military control in the film proves ineffective against the very forces the state helped create through its secret experiments on children.

  Tetsuo's transformation is frequently interpreted not as villainy but as the consequence of social exclusion. Napier situates Akira within a broader trend in Japanese fiction that places disaffected youth at the center of post-industrial city narratives, describing the film's young characters in Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke as "emblematic of generational tension in late-20th-century Japan."

  Lamarre also argues that the psychic abilities in Akira blur the boundary between human beings and weapons, with Tetsuo's physical mutation representing loss of control rather than empowerment. The book Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams places this within a tradition of Japanese science fiction linking bodily transformation to anxieties about technology. The collection Tokyo Cyberpunk discusses Akira as a key work in depicting the city as a space where human identity is reshaped by violence and social breakdown rather than by progress.

• 6. Reaching the World

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  Akira reached the United Kingdom through a theatrical release by Island Visual Arts on the 25th of January 1991. It debuted at number three on the UK box office charts, earning £439,345 in its opening weekend alone, and remained in the UK top ten for four weeks. By early March 1991 it had grossed £878,695. By 1993, the film had sold 60,000 VHS tapes in the United Kingdom, 100,000 tapes across Europe, and 100,000 tapes in the United States. The commercial success of those UK VHS sales led directly to the creation of Manga Entertainment, the distributor that would later assume the film's British distribution.

  In the United States, an English dub produced by Electric Media, written by L. Michael Haller and directed by Sheldon Renan and Wally Burr, received a limited theatrical release by Streamline Pictures on the 25th of December 1989. A second English dub was produced by Animaze and directed by Kevin Seymour in 2001 to obtain THX certification for Pioneer Entertainment's DVD release. That 2001 release became the 20th digital cinema release in North America.

  The Criterion Collection issued a LaserDisc of the film in 1992, which was the company's first animated release and its only one until Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2014. A 4K HDR remaster sourced from the original 35 mm film print was released in Japan on the 24th of April 2020, by Bandai Namco Entertainment, and in the United States by FUNimation on the 22nd of December 2020. The restored 4K version screened in North American IMAX auditoriums on the 24th of September 2020, and the 4K and IMAX re-release in the United Kingdom that October debuted again at number three on the UK box office charts.

• 7. An Inescapable Influence

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  Naruto author Masashi Kishimoto recalled being fascinated by the Akira poster and wishing to imitate Otomo's style. Ghost in the Shell, Battle Angel Alita, Cowboy Bebop, Serial Experiments Lain, and Elfen Lied are among the Japanese works that cite Akira as a direct influence. Hideo Kojima named the film as an influence on Snatcher, Policenauts, and Metal Gear Solid. Square Enix's Final Fantasy VII also belongs to the list.

  Outside Japan, John Gaeta cited Akira as artistic inspiration for the bullet time effect in The Matrix films. Todd McFarlane cited the film as an influence on the HBO animated series Spawn. The film's reach extends to Valve's Half-Life series, Dontnod Entertainment's Remember Me, and Core Design's Switchblade. The motorcycle from the film, Kaneda's Motorbike, appears in Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One and in CD Projekt's video game Cyberpunk 2077.

  In music, the Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson song "Scream" from 1995 features clips from Akira in its video. Kanye West paid homage to the film in his "Stronger" music video in 2007. Lupe Fiasco named his 2015 album Tetsuo and Youth after Tetsuo Shima. The British Film Institute places Akira alongside Blade Runner and Neuromancer as a cornerstone of the cyberpunk genre.

  The "Akira slide," the scene in which Kaneda uses a sideways skid to halt his motorbike while it trails smoke and sparks, has been widely imitated across animation, film, television, and video games. The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction records the term "Akira slide" as first appearing in 2009. When Tokyo won its bid to host the 2020 Summer Olympics in 2013, commentators noted that the film had referenced a 2020 Tokyo Olympics decades earlier; in February 2020, with the Games 147 days away, a scene from the film calling for the cancellation of the 2020 Olympics sparked a social media trend that topped Twitter topics in Japan before the Games were ultimately postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.