Akira

There is a single shot early in Akira that tells you what you're dealing with. Kaneda's motorcycle — that absurd chromium machine — slides into frame with a screech and a shower of sparks, and the camera just holds. Neo-Tokyo blazes behind it. In that moment, before a word of plot has been established, you understand you are somewhere new.

Katsuhiro Otomo released the film in Japan on 16 July 1988 with a budget of ¥1.1 billion, unprecedented in anime history. The production used 160,000 animation cels and 327 distinct colour shades, many of which had to be invented from scratch because existing stock couldn't render Neo-Tokyo at night with the depth Otomo required. The pre-scoring technique — recording dialogue before animation began so that lip movements could be matched precisely rather than approximated — was the inverse of standard practice. Geinoh Yamashirogumi, the collective who wrote the score, delivered the music before the film was finished: Balinese kecak chanting, Japanese festival drumming, orchestral electronics, all locked in place so the animators could synchronise their work to it. The result is that certain sequences have a rhythmic precision that feels less like craft and more like something that arrived pre-assembled. Otomo had spent three years compressing a 2,000-page manga into 124 minutes. He trusted his audience entirely, left the gaps where other directors would have reached for dialogue, and let the imagery carry what the story couldn't.

The setting is 2019, thirty-one years after a single energy release obliterated Tokyo and triggered World War III. A new city has risen from the wreckage — gleaming, corrupt, and rotting simultaneously. Anti-government protests boil over while the Olympic stadium goes up with gleeful cynicism on the horizon. Gang warfare scars the streets below. Into this Otomo drops two childhood friends from an orphanage: Kaneda, who leads a biker gang and has always been comfortable taking up space in the world, and Tetsuo, who follows and has spent his entire life in that shadow resenting it. When Tetsuo survives a near-collision with a government-held psychic child and begins developing telekinetic abilities, the film becomes several things at once — a conspiracy thriller, a puberty narrative rendered as body horror, and a portrait of a friendship breaking along cracks that were always there. His transformation is not just physical. He has spent years being diminished and rescued by the same person, and the power that forces its way through him is the externalisation of everything that has been suppressed. The machine, as in Tsukamoto, does not arrive from outside. It erupts from within.

The film is often described as being about nuclear anxiety, and that reading is entirely defensible. Otomo was born in 1954, which means Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not history to him but living proximity — and the film's inciting catastrophe, a single blinding sphere of light that consumes a city in an instant, maps directly onto that trauma. The opening sequence literalises it: white light, expanding, then gone. But the anxiety in Akira runs deeper than atomic allegory. Japan in 1988 was an economy operating at an inhuman tempo, a society increasingly structured around corporate productivity and the suppression of anything that couldn't be monetised, and what Tetsuo's body does — becoming uncontrollable, violent, then cosmically destructive — is what happens when you run that kind of pressure through a human being long enough.

Against this the film places the institutions that seek to contain and weaponise such power. The Colonel is the most interesting figure in this structure: not a villain in any simple sense, but a man of real, weary integrity who believes he can manage something that was never meant to be managed, and whose tragedy is that he is almost certainly the most competent person in the room and it makes no difference. And then there are the esper children — ancient, childlike, serene — who speak of evolution and the next step in terms the film is careful never to fully decode. Akira itself, the being or the state or the event, remains deliberately unexplained. The film is honest enough to know that explanation would be a lesser thing than the dread of not knowing.

The emotional core, which discussions of the spectacle tend to push aside, is the relationship between Kaneda and Tetsuo. What Otomo understands is that Kaneda's pursuit of Tetsuo throughout the film is not heroic in any clean sense — it is desperate, protective, and ultimately helpless. He cannot save his friend with bravado or a better motorcycle. He cannot match what Tetsuo has become. The final cry of Tetsuo! across the void is one of cinema's most precise expressions of helplessness, and it lands because the film has spent its entire runtime earning it.

The influence on everything that followed is impossible to overstate. The film reached Western audiences through tape trading circuits and a widely distributed dub in 1989, and it rewired expectations of what animation could be. You can trace direct lines through Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion, the visual grammar of the Wachowskis, and a hundred other things.

 For an enormous number of European and North American viewers it was also the first serious contact with anime as a form worth taking seriously — the thing that made subsequent engagement with Miyazaki and Kon and the rest possible. That debt is rarely acknowledged clearly enough.

The limitations are real. Kei is written as a function of plot rather than a person. The compression creates genuine narrative gaps. Some of this is the price of adaptation; some of it is the period. It matters less than you'd expect, because the animation has not aged, the score remains one of cinema's most distinctive and unsettling, and the central argument — about power, suppression, and what a civilisation does when it rebuilds itself on things it refuses to examine — has only become more legible with time.

The 2019 in the film has passed. Neo-Tokyo is still ahead of us, in the ways that matter.

The 4K restoration from 2019, overseen by Otomo himself, is the way to see it if you haven't already. It was also shown in cinemas on the 17th of April 2026 but I was on set and i missed that.