Let’s Roll the Tape
What is Akira?
To call Akira merely a “film” is rather like calling a supernova a “bright light.” It is a cultural explosion that fused cyberpunk grit with existential dread, animating it with brutal precision. Even decades on, its influence casts a long shadow over anime and popular culture.
The first time I watched it, I wasn’t simply entertained—I was properly unsettled. Neo-Tokyo, with its neon-soaked decay and relentless corruption, didn’t seem far removed from reality. Rather, it felt like a warped mirror held up to the modern world. Every frame whispered a warning: this could well be our future.
And honestly, I absolutely adore this film.
Released in 1988 and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo (adapting his own sprawling manga), Akira didn’t so much push the boundaries of animation as obliterate them. At the time, the production’s $5 million budget was almost unthinkable for an animated feature. Nevertheless, every yen scorches the screen. From Kaneda’s iconic motorbike slide to Tetsuo’s grotesque transformation, this wasn’t simply animation—it was pure alchemy.
Akira: A Brief Overview
In the 1980s, anime was still a niche curiosity outside Japan—until Akira crashed into global cinemas like Kaneda’s bike smashing through a riot. It didn’t just arrive; it exploded. Its budget was giant, yet every penny bled onto the screen in a frenzy of hand-drawn agony and ecstasy.
With over 160,000 animation cels, Akira wasn’t merely animated—it lived and breathed. The cityscapes sprawled out in hyper-detailed brilliance, each frame vibrating with a pulse of its own. Few had ever seen anything like it. Even today, the sheer craftsmanship turns heads and drops jaws.
More importantly, it wasn’t style without substance. Japan’s post-war anxieties, its fear of power spiralling out of control, and deep-rooted mistrust of institutions surge through the film’s veins. These aren’t just background themes; they’re the beating heart of Akira. They lend the chaos meaning, making the spectacle linger long after the credits roll.
And then there’s the ending. A swirling, psychedelic nightmare that grabs you by the throat and refuses to let go. It’s bewildering, beautiful, and utterly terrifying—leaving you gasping for air and wondering what on earth you’ve just witnessed.
In short? To me: it changed everything.
The Plot: Chaos as a Character
Neo-Tokyo, 2019. The city hums like a live wire, ready to snap. Militarised police flood the streets, anti-government protests rage, and biker gangs tear through the ruins of a Tokyo long since obliterated by an enigmatic force known only as Akira. It’s a world simmering with unrest, where hope feels like a bad joke.
At the heart of the chaos are Kaneda and Tetsuo—childhood friends bound by history but ripped apart by destiny. Their story isn’t just about friendship; it’s about the brutal cost of power and how quickly it corrupts. As the city crumbles around them, so too does their bond, leaving only wreckage in its place.
Without giving too much away, let’s just say: when Tetsuo’s psychic abilities awaken, the consequences are catastrophic. His transformation is horrifying to watch, yet impossible to look away from. It becomes the film’s terrifying, relentless heartbeat.
Meanwhile, the government’s secret experiments simmer just beneath the surface, brewing disasters of their own. The cult-like reverence surrounding Akira grows feverish, almost infectious, as the city spirals further into madness. Kaneda, caught between loyalty and survival, barrels into the chaos with a recklessness only youth can afford.
By the third act, all the threads snap. What follows isn’t a tidy climax—it’s a cosmic scream, a collapse of reason and reality itself. Akira doesn’t end so much as it detonates, leaving you stunned, bewildered, and absolutely craving more.
Character Deep Dive: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Kaneda: The Rebel Who Grew Up
Kaneda bursts onto the scene like a firecracker—red bike gleaming, cocky grin plastered across his face, and a complete disregard for anything resembling authority. He’s the lad you’d half admire, half want to punch. Yet, when Tetsuo’s terrifying transformation begins, Kaneda’s bravado hits a wall. His fierce loyalty clashes hard against a desperate instinct to survive.
Importantly, Kaneda’s journey isn’t about heroism in any traditional sense. He doesn’t save the day with grand speeches or noble ideals. Rather, he learns a bitter truth: no one commands the chaos. In the end, all he can do is stand firm, knowing full well he’s likely to be crushed by the storm.
And that final act? It’s raw, it’s cruel—and it’s heartbreakingly human.
Tetsuo: A Tragedy Written in Blood
If Kaneda is fire—wild, relentless—then Tetsuo is the spark that sets the entire world ablaze. His fall isn’t simply a tale of power corrupting absolutely. It’s a story of identity crumbling under unbearable pressure. With every grotesque mutation, something precious slips away: first his friendship, then his humanity, until there’s barely a trace of the boy he once was.
Watching Tetsuo unravel is both horrifying and tragic. His desperate hunger to be seen, to matter in a world that always dismissed him, is what ultimately dooms him. By the end, he’s less a villain and more a wounded child, screaming into the endless void.
Their bond—Kaneda’s reckless loyalty and Tetsuo’s fragile pride—is the soul of Akira. And when it finally snaps, it’s not just the world that breaks. It’s your heart.
Key Themes Explored:
Akira’s Bleeding-Edge Warnings
Akira doesn’t merely take place in a dystopia—it breathes it. The city’s filth, corruption, and chaos seep into every frame, clawing at the same anxieties that haunt us today. Government corruption isn’t simply a background detail; it’s a real reflection of real-world systems, where those in power tinker with human lives as though they were disposable experiments. Moreover, the film’s depiction of technological advancement isn’t wide-eyed futurism—it’s a disaster unfolding in slow, deliberate motion.
Yet, the heart of Akira isn’t found in its explosions or psychic battles. It’s in the small, gutting tragedies that ripple underneath. Strip away the chaos, and what remains is painfully human: friendship poisoned by envy, loyalty cracked by ambition, and innocence twisted into something monstrous. Kaneda and Tetsuo’s bond doesn’t just weaken; it shatters like brittle glass, each fragment cutting deeper as the story spirals toward its nightmarish end.
Tetsuo’s descent is especially haunting. His newfound power doesn’t liberate him—it isolates him. Every act of destruction feels like a desperate scream for recognition in a world that either exploits him or fears him. In the end, it’s about the agony of being unseen, unheard, and ultimately, undone.
Coming of Age with a Dark Twist
Most coming-of-age tales end in bittersweet wisdom, with characters finally understanding themselves and the world. Akira, however, doesn’t offer such mercy. It closes with a universe tearing itself apart, screaming in anguish. Tetsuo’s metamorphosis—his body mutating, his mind fraying—is adolescence stripped of sentimentality and amplified into full-blown body horror. Every teenager feels betrayed by their changing body at some point, yet Akira transforms that metaphor into something raw. Limbs stretch into alien forms; veins pulse with a monstrous energy that Tetsuo cannot begin to master. It’s puberty as a cosmic punishment, violent and inescapable.
Meanwhile, Kaneda’s path to adulthood unfolds in a different key. Although less dramatic, his transformation is no less devastating. Beginning as a cocky youth, swaggering through the city with a gleaming bike and a sharper grin, Kaneda believes rebellion makes him mature. However, reality dismantles that illusion piece by piece. By the end, he is no longer a boy chasing chaos for thrill’s sake—he’s a battle-worn survivor, staring into the vast, indifferent darkness of Neo-Tokyo. Growing up here doesn’t mean finding yourself; it means realising how small you are against forces that don’t care if you’re ready or not. It’s Kaneda who needs to take the tough decision.
Power, Corruption, and the Monsters We Make
Power is no blessing—it’s a cancer that spreads uncontrollably. Tetsuo, desperate to claw his way out of a lifetime spent in Kaneda’s shadow, seizes strength as if it might save him. Yet the more he grasps, the faster he slips into madness. The government’s psychic experiments mirror this tragedy perfectly: They turn children into weapons, only to recoil in terror when those weapons refuse to obey.
Even the so-called revolutionaries, waving banners of freedom, reveal their own hunger for control, their rifles held tighter than their ideals. Through every collapsing building and twisted body, Akira hammers home a crucial truth: Power doesn’t corrupt; it magnifies. And what lies beneath isn’t heroism—it’s pure, festering fear.
Akira as a Symbol of Evolution
Despite the film’s title, Akira isn’t a character you meet—it’s an event, a boundary you can’t return from. Symbolising the terrifying next leap in human evolution, Akira asks a searing question: Are we truly ready to evolve? The charred ruins of Neo-Tokyo answer with a bleak laugh. Humanity, it seems, is not fit to play gods; we are creatures of ruin, condemned to tear down what we build and repeat our disasters like a curse stitched into our DNA.
Religious and Philosophical Undertones
Beneath the shrieking violence, Akira hums with Buddhist philosophy. Tetsuo’s grotesque metamorphosis echoes samsara—the endless cycle of suffering and rebirth—while his final moments hint at mushin, a state of ego-less mind. Yet the film refuses easy transcendence. Is Tetsuo’s end a step toward enlightenment, or simply annihilation wearing a holy mask? Like a Zen koan, Akira offers no clear answers, only the uneasy feeling that perhaps to evolve is simply to vanish in a different, more spectacular way.
The Visual Brilliance of Akira: A World That Breathes (and Bleeds)
Neo-Tokyo as a Living Nightmare
Akira does not simply depict a dystopia—it thrusts you into it, forcing you to breathe the foul air and feel the cracked pavement under your feet. The oppressive weight of Neo-Tokyo’s skyline bears down in every frame, while riots crackle like a living fever across the city’s veins. Each scene feels so tactile that you might swear you could smell the burning tyres and electric neon. Although today’s computer-generated imagery boasts of realism, Akira’s painstakingly hand-drawn animation—over 160,000 individual cels—makes most modern productions look embarrassingly hollow.
Moreover, the detail isn’t just decorative; it seethes with meaning. Shadows stretch longer than they should, lights flicker with a desperation that feels almost human. Even during the film’s moments of quiet, the city never truly rests. The animation breathes in the same uneasy rhythm as its doomed inhabitants, giving Neo-Tokyo a soul as fragile and furious as Tetsuo’s.
The City as a Reflection of Collapse
Neo-Tokyo is the real antagonist, a bloated corpse of civilisation kept twitching by greed, violence, and broken promises. Its skyscrapers, vast and brutalist, loom like tombstones over the poverty festering below. Streets glow with sickly neon, while signs sputter like dying stars. Unlike Blade Runner’s misty dreamscape, Akira’s city offers no beauty in decay—only the sick certainty that collapse is inevitable.
Take the infamous bike chase, for instance. Beyond its jaw-dropping action, it serves as a frantic tour through the chaos: crumbling infrastructure, screaming citizens, flashing sirens. Here, lawlessness isn’t a glitch in the system—it is the system. Neo-Tokyo lives, but only because it refuses to die properly.
Societal Commentary Through Environment
Otomo stitches society’s collapse right into the bones of Neo-Tokyo. Take the Olympic Stadium: meant to symbolise hope and rebirth, it stands there like a sad joke, a hollow monument to a future that never arrived. Then there’s the Ruins of Old Tokyo, lurking underfoot like a stubborn memory nobody dares touch. Every broken streetlight and cracked wall reminds you that this city’s foundation is rot pretending to be progress.
And the crowds? They’re not just angry extras filling the screen. Each protester looks like someone teetering on the edge—beaten down by broken systems, finally snapping. One moment they’re marching with signs; the next, they’re looting in desperation. Otomo doesn’t paint them as villains or heroes, just people caught in a machine that chews them up either way.
More than world-building, Neo-Tokyo feels like a warning. It’s a mirror held up to post-war Japan, a country sprinting into the future so fast it left half its soul behind. Rapid modernisation birthed skyscrapers and bullet trains, sure—but it also bred isolation, alienation, and a gnawing sense that none of it actually fixed anything.
Sound familiar? It should. Walk through any packed city today and you’ll see it—the same tired faces, the same concrete jungles, the same quiet, seething rage bubbling just under the surface.
Akira’s Cultural Impact
Western impact
When people talk about the anime boom in the West, they’re really talking about Akira. Before its release, anime was a niche curiosity outside Japan, often lumped in with children’s cartoons or dismissed entirely. But Akira hit like a thunderclap. Suddenly, the West woke up to the fact that animation could be brutal, beautiful, and aimed squarely at adults.
Thanks to Akira’s success, the floodgates swung open. Without it, we might never have seen Ghost in the Shell breaking minds or Princess Mononoke pulling in audiences who had never touched a Studio Ghibli film before. Even stylish classics like Cowboy Bebop owe a debt to the road Akira paved. Hollywood, of course, took notes. Directors like James Cameron and the Wachowskis have openly admitted they cribbed ideas from it, weaving Akira’s DNA into blockbusters like The Matrix.
It exploded outward. That red bike, Kaneda’s iconic jacket, the pill emblem—they’ve all become instant shorthand for rebellion and outsider culture. Today, you can spot Akira’s fingerprints everywhere: fashion runways dripping in dystopian neon, music videos flashing with cyberpunk chaos, and video games offering up crumbling cityscapes.
Even the very phrase “Neo-Tokyo” has slipped into everyday genre slang, conjuring images of futuristic cities barely holding themselves together. And the best part? Akira’s legacy isn’t frozen in 1988. It keeps mutating, inspiring new artists, new visions, and reminding everyone that real revolutions don’t fade quietly—they leave scars across culture itself.
Why Akira Still Matters Today: A Prophecy We Keep Ignoring
Even after all these years, Akira hits like a prophecy we’re stubbornly ignoring. Its visions of unchecked technological madness, bloated political corruption, and crumbling identity don’t feel dated; if anything, they feel uncomfortably current. In an era where AI blooms faster than we can deal with it and cities buckle under their own weight, Akira is no longer a wild sci-fi warning—it’s practically a mirror.
Moreover, its influence seeps into modern storytelling like ink in water. You can trace its DNA through Cyberpunk RPG, Ghost in the Shell, and just about any dystopian flick with neon-soaked skylines. The tropes Otomo sharpened—power leading inevitably to self-destruction, technology amplifying human frailty, cities as living prisons—became blueprints everyone borrows from, knowingly or not.
His take on characters like Tetsuo, whose grasp for strength turns him into something monstrous, shaped an entire generation of narratives, especially in Eastern media. Today’s stories about mortals ascending to terrifying godhood, fuelled by hate and fear, owe to Akira’s brutal honesty.
Equally important, the visual language Otomo introduced—“high tech, low life”— gleaming monoliths towering over rotting alleyways, biker gangs roaring like a city’s anarchic heartbeat, technology dangling hope just out of reach.
Furthermore, its climax, a kaleidoscopic spiral of body horror and transcendence, smashed the idea that animation should play it safe. Animation could be violent, grotesque, beautiful—and terrifying all at once.
And Kaneda? He wasn’t some gleaming, perfect hero. He was messy, stubborn, and terrified—yet he fought anyway. It shows us that surviving the future doesn’t mean defeating it cleanly. It means enduring the chaos, scars and all.
Conclusion: A Timeless Masterpiece
Akira endures because it refuses to compromise. It doesn’t pat you on the head or offer easy answers—it grabs you by the scruff and hurls you into the void. Every frame, every sound, every narrative beat, demands you sit up and pay attention. Even now, it doesn’t feel like a relic; it feels like a living, snarling beast.
Moreover, its animation isn’t just technically brilliant—it’s viscerally felt. You don’t just watch Neo-Tokyo collapse; you live it, breathe it, taste the smoke in your throat. Although countless films have tried to copy its style, very few have managed to capture that raw, overwhelming energy.
Beyond the visuals, though, it’s the storytelling that cements Akira’s immortality. It doesn’t spoon-feed you morals, nor does it hold your hand through its psychedelic nightmare. Instead, it trusts you to get lost, to question, to wrestle with what you’re seeing. Stories that dare to leave scars rather than deliver comfort—that’s real artistry.
Furthermore, its philosophical weight gives it layers that only grow heavier with time. Each rewatch peels back something new, whether it’s a buried theme about identity or a grim warning about humanity’s arrogance.
Ultimately, Akira stands tall not just as a landmark of animation, but as a towering achievement in storytelling itself. Even three decades later, its roar hasn’t softened. In fact, if anything, it echoes louder now. True masterpieces don’t fade away—they burrow into the culture’s bones and stay there.
Akira didn’t just predict the future; it became part of it.
And, I know, this wasn’t exactly a review, it was an ode.
