Trailer
Plot summary
Neo-Tokyo, built over the ruins of Tokyo after a world war, is a city of protests, corruption and gang violence. Kaneda leads the Capsules, a biker gang, in a running feud with the rival Clowns. During a night ride, his friend Tetsuo crashes into Takashi, a child esper who has fled a government laboratory. Soldiers under Colonel Shikishima recover Takashi, hospitalize Tetsuo and take the Capsules into custody. At the police station, Kaneda meets Kei, a young woman held with the protesters, and helps her walk free. In a secret facility, Doctor Ônishi finds that Tetsuo carries psychic abilities of the same kind as Akira, the esper blamed for Tokyo's destruction decades earlier. Kiyoko, another esper, warns Shikishima that the city faces destruction again.
Cast
- Kazuhiro Kamifujias Masaru / No. 27 (voice)
- Tatsuhiko Nakamuraas Takashi / No. 26 (voice)
Show all 20 cast
- Tarô Arakawaas Army / Committee G / Eiichi Watanabe (voice)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Akira (1988)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- In February 2020, 147 days before the Tokyo Olympics, a scene in Akira calling for the cancellation of the 2020 Games, plus graffiti reading Just Cancel It!, sparked a social media trend that topped Twitter topics in Japan; the Olympics were postponed to 2021.
- In July 2021, a Saint Petersburg court banned distribution of Akira alongside Happy Tree Friends and Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion's Revenge, ruling the film could threaten children's health and psychological development.
- The "Akira slide", in which Kaneda brings his motorbike to a sideways halt trailing smoke and electric sparks, is widely imitated across animation, film, television and video games, and the term was first recorded in 2009.
- Akira was the first anime production to pre-score its dialogue: the voices were recorded before animation began and the characters' lips were animated to match, an approach still unusual today, though the voice actors performed with the aid of animatics.
- The film's UK VHS release was so successful that it led to the creation of Manga Entertainment: by 1993 Akira had sold 60,000 tapes in the United Kingdom, 100,000 in Europe and 100,000 in the United States.
- Otomo, a fan of the manga Tetsujin 28-go, took his characters' names from it — Kaneda, Colonel Shikishima, Tetsuo — and Akira is the 28th in a line of government psychics, the same number as Tetsujin-28.
- Computer-generated imagery, made by High-Tech Lab Japan and others, was used chiefly to animate Doctor Ōnishi's pattern indicator, but also to plot the paths of falling objects, model background parallax and tweak lighting and lens flares.
- Otomo began the film by writing an ending that would close off its major characters and storylines, letting him work backwards to decide which parts of the then-unfinished manga made the cut; he called making the film before finishing the manga "the worst possible idea".
Stills
Similar movies
