The classic 1988 anime Akira returns to UK, Irish, French and Spanish cinema screens on April 17, with Australia and New Zealand following in early May. Set in a dystopian neo-Tokyo, it is one of the few pieces of cyberpunk manga that has translated well to the screen.
His final message is disturbing: we are no better or worse than the elites who use technology to dominate us. We are all just part of a bigger game. A game involving power and our limited ability to use it.
Directed by original manga creator Katsuhiro Otomo, the hand-drawn animation is incredible, the story complex and the violence relentless. Together with Blade Runner (1982) and William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984), Akira is considered one of the three greatest cyberpunk classics – a genre defined by high technology and low life.
They all center around rogue loners who investigate mysteries, only to be accidentally drawn into conflict with powerful elites. And each is set in an imagined near future, where bodies are replicated, modified, and occasionally monstrous.
Akira goes for the monstrous option, driven by a relentless pursuit of power that is both natural to humans and destructive to our humanity. Otomo’s antihero, Kaneda, is a biker drawn from the real tribal subculture bozozuku biker gangswhich had tens of thousands of members in early 1980s Japan.
Otomo’s tale shows a deep familiarity with Japanese subcultures and societal concern over the legacy of the atomic bomb and aversion to mutation.
In the film, Kaneda tries to rescue his friend Tetsuo, but stumbles into a conflict between hardened idealistic terrorists and a top-secret military project. The latter is attempting to accelerate the drug-induced development of telepathic powers possessed by a group of captive children. Tetsuo has become part of the program and shows incredible power, but cannot contain it within his body.
The emphasis on power is welcome. Tetsuo has always fallen second in the biker gang to Kaneda and can’t stand it. Other effects are less welcome. As with Japan’s faltering economy, artificially accelerated development spirals out of control, eventually forcing military forces and terrorists to work together to contain Tetsuo and the mysterious Akira. Much of neo-Tokyo has been destroyed in the process. Once again, the narrative strongly echoes the legacy of the atomic bomb.
Akira and cyberpunk
Akira is a good watch and, if you have the patience, a good read.
Patience is certainly an important virtue for Akira fans. They’ve been waiting decades to see a live action version. The recent collapse of efforts to bring it to the screen in 2025 helped spur this year’s anime comeback.
But how exactly does cyberpunk’s vision of the future match up with the real story that unfolded after the genre’s golden age in film and literature? Though it was sorely mistaken, cyberpunk anticipated several defining features of contemporary life – most notably anti-elitist populism and political protest.
Cyberpunk, including Akira, is broadly anti-authoritarian, but is often set in worlds where no viable alternative seems to exist.
As a result, dissent in cyberpunk tends to be more expressive than goal-oriented, with violence often appearing as one of its most powerful forms of articulation.
This is, no doubt, a reasonable prediction of a long-term trend within political dissent – especially when (as in cyberpunk) a connection is made between technology and elite control. It’s worth noting that Waymo’s driverless taxis have long been a popular target for protesters 2025 Riots in Los Angeles.
So there is a similarity to a point. But cyberpunks like Kaneda and Tetsuo, and their counterparts in other classic genres, were more concerned with power than wealth. Today’s left-right intersectional dissent centers on bankers and trades on an idea of financial capital in which banking dominates the industry. Cyberpunk was anti-authority, but it had a better idea of who was really in charge – the elites for whom wealth was primarily corporate and only a means to advance power.
In our world – the current world of advanced technology – no one knows how much is owned by the richest corporate tech figures like Elon Musk (Tesla and Space-X), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon). But we know that none of them are bankers. Their wealth supports their power, and as in cyberpunk they seek wider forms of social and political influence.
Unlike cyberpunk elites, they face limitations in their ability to exert such influence. Musk’s brief collaboration with Donald Trump was a marriage made in the divorce courts, with little prospect of staying the course. In Akira, elites are much less restricted, especially in the military.
Akira focuses on power, as opposed to mere wealth, using a secret military program as a plot driver. But it does so with moral ambiguity. There are no monsters at the top. The army is under the command of the Colonel, who is not a particularly evil or unsympathetic character. He just happens to be someone on the other side of Kaneda and the terrorist underground that Kaneda has fallen in with for reasons that have more to do with safe sex appeal than politics.
After all, Tetsuo and Kaneda can’t go against the Colonel as good guys versus bad guys, or as friends of many set against the enemy elite. Kaneda wields power ruthlessly within his biker gang, and Tetsuo desperately wants power. Both are limited only by their appeal to (secondary) female characters. The desire for power is represented as natural and, ultimately, a cosmic urge that is slowly making its way into consciousness through humans—albeit at the expense of our small, vulnerable bodies.
Within this narrative there is a desire for power within all of humanity. A commodity that is both constructive and destructive. To give it up would be to give up our humanity. To imagine that we can use it indefinitely is a great illusion. Eventually, the temple bell rings and it’s over. This makes the elites who hold power no better or worse than the rest of us. The distinction between experimenters and those of us experimented upon no longer matters.
Tony Milligan is a teaching associate in philosophy, School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities, University of Sheffield.
This article was reprinted from Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read on original article.
