Katsuhiro Otomo

Otomo began his career as a manga artist in the early 1970s, quickly building a reputation for detailed, cinematic linework and morally ambiguous storytelling that stood apart from the era's more conventional manga styles. His breakout series established him as one of the medium's most technically accomplished artists years before he ever directed a frame of animation.

A manga artist and animator whose adaptation of his own epic redefined what animation could be, he introduced a generation of Western viewers to anime in a single neon-soaked bike slide. He began serializing the Akira manga in 1982 and was still finishing the sprawling story in print while directing the film adaptation, forcing the movie to depart from and eventually outpace its own unfinished source material — an almost unheard-of production circumstance for a film of its scale.

The production used over 160,000 hand-painted animation cels and was, at the time, the most expensive anime film ever made, employing an unusually large staff of animators working from an original score recorded before a single frame was drawn. Otomo continued working in both manga and film afterward, but Akira remains the single most influential anime feature in shaping how Western audiences and filmmakers understood the medium's artistic potential.