There Will Never Be a Film Like Akira

Akira1988

As someone who runs an anime review account, it feels almost sacrilegious to admit this, but I only recently watched Akira. Yes, the 1988 Akira. The one that’s practically the backbone of every anime, history, documentary, and cyberpunk fan’s mood board. I held out for years, despite all the peer pressure and persistent recommendations from friends and strangers alike. And now, having finally seen it? I feel like I've finally found something I've spent decades looking for. 

But my hesitation wasn’t about ignorance or apathy. I knew exactly how important Akira was. I’ve always admired it from a distance. Katsuhiro Otomo is a creative titan, and the film’s influence on cyberpunk, dystopian storytelling, and animation as a whole is cemented in pop culture. If I’m being honest, though, I think I avoided it because of how loudly it was celebrated in Western fandom spaces. Its mythic status made it feel...unreachable. Like I needed to earn the right to engage with it, maybe by proving myself through deeper cuts and obscure titles first. That mindset feels silly in hindsight. Watching Akira shattered that illusion. For all its mainstream popularity and endless citations by film nerds and anime encyclopedias, there really is no equal. And in today’s media landscape, I doubt anything like it will ever be made again.

When Akira premiered in 1988, anime hadn’t yet earned global respect and was largely invisible to Western audiences. Even filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas dismissed the idea that Japanese animation could break internationally. This is odd, considering Western cyberpunk films were heavily influenced by Japanese media, technology, and East Asian aesthetics, mainly because of Japan’s economic boom. Akira didn’t just challenge assumptions; it bulldozed past them. Suddenly, anime could be serious, mature, experimental, and politically charged for both Japanese and Western audiences. Yet Akira stands apart partly because it came from a unique moment: Japan’s 1980s economic bubble.

The ’80s saw an unprecedented financial boom, with soaring markets and a rising middle class. Where there’s surplus, there’s room for risk and funding. The anime industry flourished, with more animated feature films and bold experimentation before genre formulas took hold. Creators pushed boundaries, producing abstract, violent, meditative, even spiritual stories—like Angel’s Egg, Royal Space Force, Grave of the Fireflies, and ultimately, Akira. Seven production companies teamed up for Akira, with a budget of 8 to 11 billion yen, nearly ten times Nausicaä’s cost. Parts were animated at 24 frames per second, a rarity even today. Most anime uses fewer frames, but Akira’s fluid animation gives weight and texture to every scene, from neon flickering on wet streets to Tetsuo’s grotesque transformation. 

Even the floor shifts subtly to keep the perspective consistent. Who animates the floor?

This obsessive detail serves a bigger purpose: Neo-Tokyo itself. The city isn’t just a backdrop, it’s a living, decaying entity. Rebuilt after a mysterious explosion wiped out Tokyo, Neo-Tokyo is once again on the verge of collapse. This isn't told through exposition dumps or lore-heavy monologues, it pulses through every shadow and every crusty abandoned alleyway. I see it in the cold brutality of the police, the haunted eyes of psychic children, the unhinged cults worshipping apocalypse, the skyscrapers sagging under the weight of history. The whole place breathes trauma.

One of the reasons Akira works is its approach to technology. While Western science fiction often positions tech as a path to salvation, Japanese media, especially Akira, feels more like a cautionary tale. The film opens with what looks like a nuclear blast. You can see a recurring theme of this in later Japanese anime that use the World War II aftermath as a thematic motif for their fictional stories. Akira confronts the scars of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Every psychic outburst, every failed experiment, every military panic all stem from that lingering national trauma. Tetsuo’s powers aren’t just random mutations. They’re inherited trauma in violent form.

And here’s where the film starts to pull the rug out from under me. On paper, it looks like a classic hero’s journey. But Akira unravels that framework thread by thread. Rather than a chosen one ascending to greatness, Tetsuo begins as a broken boy crushed under institutional neglect. When he gains power, he doesn’t evolve into a hero like we'd assume; he spirals. What starts as a transformation quickly rots into horror. His violence doesn’t come from a place of power, but from pain. His rampage feels less like rebellion and more like a cry for help, an eruption from someone who was never taught another way to be seen. I started to hate him before I ever understood him.

Kaneda doesn’t fit the mould of a hero. He’s not especially smart or strong, just a loudmouth punk with a huge ego. But he’s the one who stays, because he can’t let go of his friend. His growth is uneven, rough around the edges. There’s no big revelation, just a choice to keep showing up. In the hospital rescue, he’s completely out of his depth, swallowed by guards, machines, and psychic chaos. Still, he fights. No powers, no speeches. Just grit. When he confronts Tetsuo at his most terrifying, there’s no dramatic blow or moral triumph. Kaneda cries. He runs toward him. 

I always envisioned Akira to display senseless violence as an enticing component for boys to engage with, as some sort of visual inherent fantasy. The film doesn’t hand him victory. Instead, Akira offers a heroism that feels fragile, furious, and unresolved. Even Tetsuo’s final transformation, a mind-bending cosmic evolution, isn’t a triumph. The visuals explode with imagination, but emotionally it’s quiet and hollow, a lament, not a celebration. I didn't walk away thinking he ascended. I thought about what was lost. Akira rewires mythology. There’s no elixir at the end, just wreckage and the vague chance of starting over.

One fascinating aspect of Akira is how the film isn’t a straightforward adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga, but a fractured, reimagined version shaped by necessity and experimentation. Since the manga was unfinished when production began, the movie takes a leaner, more chaotic form, stripping down plotlines, heightening urgency, and embracing ambiguity. 

Otomo said working on the film influenced how he concluded the manga, making the two feel less like source and adaptation and more like alternate timelines from the same explosive origin. The manga fleshes out characters like Kei and the Colonel, exploring motivations and larger ideological conflicts, tracing a haunting post-apocalyptic aftermath where psychic powers fade and political struggles dominate. The film compresses a sprawling narrative into a fast, brutal, visually overwhelming experience, yet its emotional and thematic weight lands with astonishing force.

Anime is everywhere. It’s accessible. Marketed. Monetized. You can stream Chainsaw Man as it airs, get a Demon Slayer movie every year, and buy merch at your local mall. But Akira doesn’t feel like part of that ecosystem. It feels more alien to me. Not just because of how it looks, but because of the conditions that birthed it. The convergence of wealth, time, risk, and raw vision doesn’t really exist anymore. I bought the original DVD because it felt like the right way to indulge in something as iconic as Akira, and I'm glad I did because it felt like back in the old days when you'd go to blockbuster (R.I.P) and phsycally feel like you're consuming media in the way it was originally intended. Today’s anime industry is overworked, outsourced and underfunded. Even prestige projects toe the line, favouring safe themes and audience-tested story arcs. Akira didn’t try to be liked. It tried to say something.

Akira doesn’t deliver overt political statements through grand dramatic monologues, but its exploration of power and identity is unsettling for its time. Who gets to control the world? Who gets erased by that control? The military’s brutality is undeniable, but so is the terror that Tetsuo unleashes. Nobody is clean. The film doesn’t offer moral clarity, only moral exhaustion. It left me wondering whether any structure built on fear and force can sustain itself without collapse. Like all great dystopias, Akira doesn’t point fingers at heroes or villains. It just shows a system devouring itself, and asks what might grow from the ashes. The movie to me just felt like the unchecked rage of generations that continues on today; as history repeats itself, we keep watching from the sidelines, unable or unwilling to break the cycle ourselves. Because reflection isn't simple or guaranteed, I watch movies to feel like it is.

I came late to the party. But I still attended, prepared this time. Watching Akira now, not as a teenage anime newbie, but as an adult who’s seen how the industry has changed, makes it matter even more. As a one-of-a-kind cultural artifact and time capsule from a moment when the impossible was, briefly, possible, I can positively and unfortunately make a non-biased statement that there will never be another anime like Akira. I mean, it's 37 years later, and that's still a reality. But I think that’s okay. Because once is enough to change everything.