Director: Katsuhiro Otomo
Screenplay: Katsuhiro Otomo, Izo Hashimoto
Producers: Ryōhei Suzuki, Shunzo Kato
Voice Cast (Japanese Original): Mitsuo Iwata, Nozomu Sasaki, Mami Koyama, Tesshō Genda
Music: Shōji Yamashiro / Geinoh Yamashirogumi
Rating BBFC: 15 ·
Runtime: 124 mins
Some films don’t return; they re-emerge, like one of titular character, Akira’s psychic shockwaves, asking why we ever looked away. Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 cyberpunk benchmark is back in UK cinemas and IMAX since 17 April in a 4K restoration, and almost four decades on, the thing still moves like nothing else. If your only Akira has been a laptop screen, this is the version that makes Neo-Tokyo feel like a true character with weather and all.
The story is famously simple in outline and operatic in execution. In a Tokyo rebuilt after World War III, biker gang leader Kaneda and his prickly best friend Tetsuo crash, almost literally, into a government secret involving a strange greenish-grey hued and haired child with godlike powers. Tetsuo is hurt and taken away by secretive military types for treatment (aka experiments), when his readings go off the chart compared to a mysterious powerful entity known as Akira. What started out as a friendship strained by adolescent resentment becomes a chase through a city eating itself. The wizened green-grey child, and his two equally aged looking super-powered children try to hold the line against this Tetsuo-cum-Akira monstrosity, and their cost is real.
What lifts Akira above its many imitators is how human it stays around the spectacle. The Kaneda–Tetsuo dynamic is the film’s beating heart: a sullen sidekick who never wanted rescuing, a leader who can’t admit he’s scared. Their love interests aren’t ornament, they ground the chaos. Otomo and his enormous animation team draw the city with such patient specificity you can practically smell the petrol; the brake-light streaks across wet asphalt do more world-building than most blockbusters manage in two hours. And Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s score, a clatter of gamelan, Noh chant and synth, does the heavy lifting when the visuals pause for breath. It’s still the most original sound any anime has put on a screen.
The final act tips into pure body-horror cosmology, and your tolerance for that will decide where you land. I love it. The “Tetsuo!” / “Kaneda!” exchange at the end has been parodied to death precisely because it earns the weight. Empire’s old line, “no AKIRA, no Matrix” is fair; you might be even be tempted to add no Inception, no Dark City, while we’re at it. But the film hasn’t aged into nostalgia; it has aged into a kind of permanent present tense.
The 4K re-release is the gift here. See it large, see it loud.