Critics Consensus: Akira is distractingly bloody and violent, but its phenomenal animation and sheer kinetic energy helped set the standard for modern anime. It scored a 87% on the Tomatometer. The Tomatometer score — based on the opinions of hundreds of film and television critics — is a trusted measurement of critical recommendation for millions of fans. It represents the percentage of professional critic reviews that are positive for a given film or television show.

Akira won the Silver Scream Award at the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival in 1992.

"Of course, "Akira" is not a long cartoon, but an ambitious animated feature that can be seen as a parable of scientific responsibility and cosmic rebirth, or just an action-packed serial. Or it can be seen as a visceral example of the future of animation." (Harrington, 1989)

"The anime movie was adapted from the original manga by Katsuhiro Otomo that started out in Young magazine back in 1982. Covering effectively the first half of the manga, the truncated narrative was only really resolved in the latter parts of the manga. The manga eventually finished in 1990, two years after the film was released.
However, it found a huge following both in Japan and abroad, not least for its groundbreaking animation quality as well as its surprisingly involved story and characters." (Barder, 2018)

"you can see just how much the film has influenced western culture since its original release 28 years ago. It was the first case of a Japanese film coming over to the UK and US and not having to water itself to be engaged with or lauded by critics. It opened the floodgates for not just anime but the whole of Japanese culture to be accepted by western audiences." (Usher, 2016, September)

"There is certainly a lot going on in Akira and similar to something like Ghost in the Shell might take more than one viewing to fully appreciate. Regardless of whether or not you grasp the entirety of the plot, there is no denying the level of artistry on display. Akira was made during the Cel animation days, meaning there were no computers that created the look of the feature. Instead, there were extremely detailed paintings layered upon one another, with the care taken in each of these paintings to the extreme." (Covill, 2017)