Akira

Akira arrived in 1988 and broke open the door for anime in the West. Set in a dystopian 2019 Neo-Tokyo, rebuilt after a catastrophic explosion destroyed the original city, the film follows Kaneda, the leader of a teenage biker gang, as his childhood friend Tetsuo gains dangerous psychic powers after his motorcycle collides with an escaped child psychic test subject. What starts as a story about disaffected youth spirals into something much larger, touching on government conspiracies, military overreach, and powers that threaten to reshape reality itself.

Community opinion on Akira falls into a specific and recognizable pattern. Almost everyone agrees the animation is extraordinary. Almost everyone agrees the story is hard to follow, at least on a first viewing. The gap between those two observations is where all the interesting discussion lives. Some viewers find the visual spectacle enough to carry the film through its narrative rough patches. Others walk away impressed but confused, respecting the craft while wishing the story had been clearer.

Characters at Its Finest in Akira

The animation. That’s where every conversation about Akira starts, and it’s where the film’s reputation was built. Over 160,000 animation cels were produced, an enormous number even by feature film standards. Characters move with a fluidity and weight that remains rare in animation decades later. The opening motorcycle chase through Neo-Tokyo’s neon-lit streets is one of the most iconic sequences in the history of the medium, a piece of pure kinetic filmmaking that communicates speed, danger, and style without a single wasted frame.

Neo-Tokyo itself functions as more than a backdrop. The city is dense, layered, and alive, packed with crowds, traffic, protest movements, and decay. Backgrounds are painted with obsessive detail, creating a world that feels vast enough to exist beyond the edges of the screen. The animators invented dozens of new colors specifically for the film, many designed to capture the way neon light behaves at night. That level of commitment to world-building through pure visual craft is essentially unmatched in hand-drawn animation.

Thematic ambition sets Akira apart from typical action fare. The film engages with nuclear anxiety, the trauma of destruction and rebuilding, the dangers of unchecked government power, and the volatile energy of youth without purpose. These themes are woven into the visual design as much as the dialogue. Neo-Tokyo’s gleaming surfaces conceal rot. Military facilities hide experiments on children. The city’s scars are both literal and metaphorical. For viewers attuned to what the film is doing beneath its action sequences, there’s a rich layer of meaning to unpack.

Shoji Yamashiro’s soundtrack, performed by the collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi, is unlike anything else in film. Blending Indonesian gamelan, Japanese noh traditions, and choral elements, the music creates an atmosphere that’s simultaneously ancient and futuristic. It gives the film a ceremonial, almost ritualistic quality that elevates the psychic confrontations beyond simple sci-fi spectacle.

Akira’s Weakest Moments

Plot is Akira’s most consistent point of criticism, and it’s a fair one. The film condenses a massive manga series into 124 minutes, and the compression shows. Story threads are introduced and abandoned. Character motivations shift without adequate setup. The political machinations of the military, the government, and various resistance groups pile up in ways that are difficult to track on a first viewing. Many people who watch Akira report needing a second or third viewing to piece together what actually happened, and some never fully do.

Character development suffers from the compressed runtime. Kaneda is charismatic but thin. Tetsuo’s transformation from insecure friend to destructive force happens with an intensity that’s visually stunning but psychologically rushed. Female characters, particularly Tetsuo’s girlfriend Kaori, are notably underdeveloped and exist largely in relation to the male leads. The film is so focused on its larger canvas that individual human stories get squeezed.

Tonally, Akira is relentlessly aggressive. It’s violent, loud, and confrontational from start to finish, with very few moments of quiet or warmth. This is by design, and it serves the film’s themes about cycles of destruction. But it also means the viewing experience can be exhausting. There’s no real emotional reprieve, no character the audience can relax with. For viewers who need an emotional anchor in their stories, the constant intensity can push them away rather than pull them in.

Pacing stumbles in the middle act. After the propulsive energy of the opening, the film settles into a stretch of exposition and political maneuvering that lacks the visual dynamism of what came before and what follows. The momentum picks up again for the climax, but the middle section is where attention tends to wander.

Why It Still Matters for Akira

Akira’s lasting importance comes from a combination of what it achieved technically and what it represented culturally. Before Akira, anime was a niche interest outside Japan. After Akira, it was a medium that serious film audiences had to reckon with. The film demonstrated that animation could be adult, complex, visually ambitious, and thematically weighty in ways that Western animation rarely attempted. Its influence extends well beyond anime, with filmmakers across genres citing it as a touchstone for visual storytelling, world-building, and the depiction of urban dystopia. Whether it’s the best anime film is debatable. That it’s one of the most important is not.

Should You Watch Akira?

Akira is essential for anyone interested in the history of animation, cyberpunk fiction, or Japanese cinema. Fans of visually driven filmmaking who can forgive narrative messiness in favor of sheer craft will find it rewarding. It’s also worth watching for anyone curious about the roots of modern anime, since so much of what came after bears Akira’s fingerprints.

Skip it if confusing plots frustrate you more than stunning visuals excite you, if you prefer your stories character-driven, or if extreme animated violence isn’t something you’re interested in. The R rating reflects graphic content throughout. This is a film that prioritizes impact over accessibility, and it won’t apologize for that.

The Verdict on Akira

Akira is a film built on contradictions. Its animation is peerless, but its story can leave you grasping for connections that aren’t always there. It changed the trajectory of an entire medium, but watching it cold in the present day can be a disorienting experience. What holds it together is sheer conviction. Every frame radiates a confidence and ambition that most films, animated or otherwise, never approach. It’s a flawed landmark, and there’s nothing else quite like it.