Akira’s Standard

Opening with Kaneda’s bike skidding across that neon highway—that moment when you understand everything in anime is about to change. That’s 1988’s Akira. A film that didn’t just transform Japanese animation. It transformed what animation could be at all.

I came to anime when it was scarce in English, hunting for fansubs and strange VHS copies. And if you trace what came after—Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell, the material that pushed structure and image into uncomfortable places—it all leads back to Katsuhiro Otomo’s film. He built something that didn’t need animation to justify itself as cinema. It was cinema. Dense. Violent. Visually bewildering. Set in a Tokyo that was simultaneously future and ruin.

The plot—Shotaro Kaneda, his friend Tetsuo, motorcycle gangs, psychic collapse—is almost secondary. What matters is the discipline of the image. Every frame composed like it might be the last one Otomo gets to make. That kind of care, that refusal to shortcut the visuals, it became the standard. After Akira, you couldn’t phone it in. Everything that came after knew that.

Just as important is the permission the film granted. Permission to be structurally strange. Permission to let a narrative fracture. Permission to make something not primarily for children, even if it was drawn. Every ambitious anime in the decades that followed walked through a door Akira opened.

What’s strange is how little Akira has aged, even now. The visuals, yes—technically immaculate. But it’s the thinking behind every frame. The refusal to make anime feel cheap or secondary. That became the standard for everything after, and most of it is still trying to match it.

There’s a documentary about this—Super Eyepatch Wolf made The Impact of Akira—but you don’t need it. Just look at what came next. The influence is everywhere, written into the DNA of nearly every ambitious anime since. That’s how you know something mattered.