Akira (1988): The Film That Taught the World What Animation Could Be

In 1988, the animated film "Akira" arrived in Japanese cinemas with a budget of 1.1 billion yen — at the time, the most expensive animated film ever produced in Japan. Director Katsuhiro Otomo, adapting the first half of his own sprawling manga, had insisted on standards of production that the industry had never previously attempted: 24 frames per second fully animated (compared to the 8 or fewer frames per second standard for television anime), 160,000 individually drawn animation cels, lip-synced animation recorded to dialogue rather than the Japanese industry's standard practice of recording dialogue to match existing animation, and a level of background detail that required staff to paint individual bricks in background cityscapes. The resulting film looked like nothing anyone had seen.

The story — a motorcycle gang member in a dystopian future Tokyo acquires catastrophic telekinetic powers after contact with a government experiment — is simultaneously a political allegory about postwar Japan, a body horror narrative, and a meditation on power and its corrupting effects. The imagery Otomo created for the film's climax — organic matter expanding to fill space, the boundary between human body and environment dissolving — has been referenced, quoted, and homaged in Western film and music videos for over thirty years.

"Akira" reached Western audiences through an English dub released in 1989 and expanded through VHS. For many Western viewers, particularly those who had grown up believing that animation was categorically a children's medium, it was a revelatory experience. Here was animation depicting adult themes — violence, political corruption, addiction, the horror of uncontrolled power — with a visual sophistication that no live-action film could have achieved at comparable cost. The film forced a revision of basic assumptions about what animation was and what it could do.

The influence on Western filmmakers is documented and direct. The Wachowskis cited "Akira" as an influence on "The Matrix." Kanye West referenced it in his "Stronger" music video. James Cameron, Christopher Nolan, and Darren Aronofsky have all discussed it as formative. Entire sequences from the film — the motorcycle slide, the expansion sequence — have been recreated or referenced in productions that have themselves influenced subsequent generations of filmmakers, creating a lineage of "Akira" influence that extends far beyond works that acknowledge it directly.

Otomo himself has spent the decades since "Akira" working slowly and selectively. His 2004 film "Steamboy" took nine years to produce. A live-action American adaptation of "Akira" has been in various stages of development since the early 2000s and has never been made, which may itself be evidence of the film's impossibility to replicate: it is so thoroughly a product of a specific moment, medium, and cultural context that translation into any other form seems, so far, to defeat the most determined efforts.