Everything Downstream of Akira

Without Akira, none of it exists. Not Neon Genesis Evangelion. Not Ghost in the Shell. Not Dragon Ball Z as we know it. Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 film didn’t just arrive—it rewrote what animation was allowed to be, and everything that came after carries its DNA whether it acknowledges the debt or not.

The premise reads almost pulpy on paper: Shotaro Kaneda and Tetsuo Shima, members of a motorcycle gang in a post-World War III Neo-Tokyo, stumble into a government conspiracy involving psychic children and a dormant power capable of ending the world. But Otomo’s execution turned that pulp into something genuinely apocalyptic in scope—images of a city tearing itself apart, of a body mutating beyond its owner’s control, of power that no one is equipped to hold. It still looks extraordinary. Not "for its time" extraordinary—actually extraordinary, full stop.

The lazy dismissal of anime as nerd-basement fantasy has always irritated me, and Akira is the most effective rebuttal to that dismissal I know of. This is a film about trauma, political paranoia, and what happens when institutions abandon the people they’re supposed to protect—dressed in the most kinetic visual language cinema had produced to that point.

Super Eyepatch Wolf’s documentary The Impact of Akira: The Film That Changed Everything traces the ripple effects outward—into Western animation, into Hollywood blockbusters, into independent games, into the way we think about dystopia as an aesthetic. It’s thorough and it doesn’t oversell its argument because it doesn’t need to. The evidence is everywhere.

If you haven’t seen Akira, that’s probably the most important correction you can make to your cultural education right now. Possibly the most significant Asian film of the postwar period. I don’t say that lightly.