Akira (1988)
アキラ
Toho· Japan· 124 min· Japanese
Directed by Katsuhiro OtomoMusic by Shoji Yamashiro
Synopsis
Neo-Tokyo, 2019, thirty-one years after a psychic detonation leveled the old city. Teenage biker Kaneda's gang collides with a secret government program when his volatile friend Tetsuo awakens powers that could end the world — powers connected to a name the state buried underground: Akira.
Review
Akira is the film that forced the West to take animation seriously as cinema. Adapting his own 2,000-page manga, Katsuhiro Otomo threw unprecedented resources at the screen — 160,000+ animation cels, 327 colors (fifty invented for the film), pre-scored dialogue rare in anime — and produced a moving painting of a city eating itself. Neo-Tokyo, all stacked light and rot, is as complete a place as Blade Runner's LA, and drawn entirely by hand.
The story is a headlong rush: biker gangs, revolutionaries, wrinkled psychic children, a military that keeps god in a cryogenic vault. At its center is the ugliest, truest friendship in sci-fi — Kaneda the swaggering leader, Tetsuo the bullied kid brother figure whose sudden omnipotence curdles years of humiliation into apocalypse. 'You've always been a pain in the ass, KANEDAAA!' The film understands that the scariest thing you can give a wounded teenager is power.
And the climax delivers body horror on a scale animation had never attempted: Tetsuo's flesh outgrowing his will, an infant god of meat and machinery swallowing a stadium. The bike slide, the tetsuo/kaneda shouting matches, the capsule-pill logo — all of it iconic; the film's DNA is in everything from The Matrix to Stranger Things. Cyberpunk's other capital city, and animation's coming-of-age.
Trivia & Color Notes
327 colors, 50 invented
Akira used 327 distinct paint colors — around fifty mixed exclusively for the film — largely because most of it takes place at night, where standard cel palettes failed. Over 160,000 cels were painted by hand.
The bike slide
Kaneda's red power-bike slide — brake lights smearing, body low — is the most homaged single shot in animation, restaged in Batman, Adventure Time, Ready Player One, Jordan Peele's Nope and dozens more.
It predicted the Tokyo 2020 Olympics
The film's Neo-Tokyo is preparing for the 2020 Olympics, stadium countdown and all — 32 years early. When the real Tokyo 2020 games were disrupted, the film's '147 days to go' graffiti went viral.
The score came first
Geinoh Yamashirogumi — a collective of hundreds of amateur and professional musicians — recorded the score before animation, so scenes were timed to music. Their 'Symphonic Suite Akira' stands alone as an album.
Dialogue before drawings
Unusually for anime, dialogue was recorded first and lips animated to match ('prescoring'), one reason Akira's characters feel eerily present. The film's budget made it the most expensive anime ever at the time.
Psychic powers and government ESP programs are fantasy — though Cold War powers really did fund (fruitless) psychic research programs, which the film mirrors knowingly. Its sharpest science is social and thematic: post-nuclear trauma, urban decay, corrupt technocracy and biological transcendence as body horror. Trivia for the calendar-minded: Akira's Neo-Tokyo hosts the 2020 Olympics — the film 'predicted' Tokyo 2020, countdown signage and all, including graffiti demanding cancellation.
🎵 Soundtrack
Music by Shoji Yamashiro
Geinoh Yamashirogumi's score — gamelan, taiko, Noh chanting and synthesizers, composed before animation began — remains unique in cinema. The 'Kaneda' theme's clattering jegog percussion is instantly recognizable and endlessly sampled.
🔗 This film connects to…
Cast & Crew
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