AKIRA (アキラ) is a 1988 Japanese animated sci-fi action film directed Katsuhiro Otomo, written by Otomo and Izo Hashimoto, produced by TMS Entertainment and several partnered Japanese animation/tech companies all referred as The AKIRA Committee. The film features the voices of Mitsuo Iwata, Nozomu Sasaki, Mami Koyama, and Taro Ishida. It is an adaption on Otomo's manga AKIRA, focusing mainly on the first half of the story.

The film depicts a dystopian version of Tokyo in the year 2019, with cyberpunk tones. The plot focuses more on the emotional involvement of Tetsuo Shima and his long-term friend Shotaro Kaneda. While most of the character designs and settings were adapted from the original 2182-page manga, the restructured plot of the movie differs considerably, pruning much of the last half due to time constraint. This decision also was possibly made to avoid controversies with the contents in the manga.

The film became a hugely popular cult film around the world, and is widely considered to be a landmark in feature-length animation.

A secret military project endangers Neo-Tokyo when it turns a biker gang member into a rampaging psychic psychopath that only two teenagers and a group of psychics can stop.

For most people outside of Japan, Akira is probably their first contact with the world of manga and anime. The original manga is an epic work and the movie is arguably one of the finest animated films ever made. So it seemed entirely necessary to meet up with the creator Katsuhiro Otomo at his home in Tokyo to discuss all of his work.
While many know Otomo for creating Akira, he has had a very long and involved career as a manga artist, writer and director, for both live-action and animation. Obviously, I wanted to find out more about how Akira came about but Otomo is a very multi-faceted individual and also has an excellent eye for mechanical design. So we covered all manner of subjects during our discussion together.

In 1988, Katsuhiro Ôtomo turned his bestselling manga into a $10 million feature-length cartoon. The result, Akira, is quite simply one of the greatest animated movies ever made. With its release in Neo-Tokyo-enhancing Blu-ray, Empire talks to Ôtomo and traces the making of the cartoon classic that helped shape the modern blockbuster...
The audiences who saw the first Godzilla (1954) might have been watching a documentary; after all, the damage by the scaly Big G was no worse than that meted out by B-29s. Three decades on, the apocalypse was still a threat, but also a thrill: a way for a new generation to trample down the old world and build another. In Akira, one of the main characters, a colonel, mourns that, “Gone are the passion and joys of reconstruction.” But destruction is also joyous and passionate. When Akira’s director, Katsuhiro Ôtomo, was asked which book had the greatest impact on him, he nominated H. G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds, in which Martians obliterate 19th century London and the Home Counties. (Ôtomo would beat up Victorian London in a later anime epic, Steamboy.) Akira is full of smashing down and building up — sometimes at the same time — as creation and destruction become part of one great, organic process. Our first sight of Akira’s Neo-Tokyo is a visceral red shape suggesting a heart, lungs or guts. Teen biker gangs rule the streets on huge, phallic motorbikes that blur into neon-coloured speedlines. Armed police battle the rioting unemployed, terrorist gangs adding to the mayhem. And in a super-deluxe nursery, housing a top-secret state project, three withered children await the return of their divine brother. A boy named Akira...