Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | May 7, 2026
I’m not entirely sure why Akira has received yet another cinema re-release this year, It’s not celebrating a major anniversary, and its 4K restoration was already a hit a few years ago. But whenever it’s back in theatres, I am duty-bound to pay my money and see it on the biggest screen possible. This is a masterpiece we’re talking about, after all. It’s the film that introduced vast swaths of the world outside of Japan to the very concept of anime, and its legacy can be seen everywhere in pop culture, from Cowboy Bebop to Half-Life to Nope. Every new viewing brings with it a discovery, be it a background detail or a line reading. This time around, however, I was confronted by the brute force of the film’s prescience, and maybe that’s why it’s in cinemas in 2026.
What is there to say about Akira that hasn’t been said many times over? Katsuhiro Otomo’s epic, based on part of his equally grand manga (incomplete at the time of production), is a legend in its field. Set in 2019, in a Japan built from the ruins of World War 3, a group of teenage bikers led by Kaneda get into gang fights on the streets of Neo-Tokyo. One such battle ends with Tetsuo, Kaneda’s best friend, crashing into a strange child with an aged face. This incident ignites something inside of Tetsuo, a dormant psychic power that is growing at a rapid rate. The government wants to harness it. But we know how this is going to end.
Watching Akira, especially on a large screen, is a thrilling sensory overload. The astonishing level of detail you’re overwhelmed with, right down to each individually painted skyscraper window, immerses you in the neon hellscape of Neo-Tokyo. The score, which borrows heavily from Japanese Noh music, is an anxiety-inducing thrum that keeps you forever on edge. If you’re of that generation where most TV animation was four frames per second and the backgrounds were on a repeating loop, being witness to the fluidity of Otomo’s style must have been a trip. This is a film that feels alive.
This is an indelibly Japanese story, which is one reason why a prospective Hollywood remake has never made any sense. It’s about a Tokyo rebuilt atop the wreckage of war into a hyper-modern metropolis that is the envy of the outside world. On the ground, however, things are far tougher. The government is corrupt. Protests against their overreach quickly turn violent. Blood on the streets is an everyday occurrence, be it from the biker gangs or the soldiers with tanks. And in the middle of it all are the teens: ignored or derided, beaten by the cops and shoved into underfunded schools with no hope of a future. The elder generations f*cked it up for them, and now they’re going to make things even worse by exploiting the kids for their own twisted gain.
That’s what really stuck with me on this most recent rewatch. I couldn’t get over the stifling fury of Kaneda and his friends. They beat one another up on the highways of Neo-Tokyo because that’s all they have. Many of them are orphans, raised in a system where bullying was prevalent and adults seemed non-existent. Those in government seem to only care about lining their own pockets at the expense of the people. The army are extremely trigger happy. The scientists who get their hands on Tetsuo are all but torturing him for the sake of data. And I always forget this when I watch Akira: Kaneda is a dork. Yeah, he looks cool as hell on that iconic bike and he knows how to use it, but off it, he’s a dweeby teen who likes to annoy adults and is hoping a girl will like him. There are moments in the film where he feels even younger than his adolescent years, and the same goes for Tetsuo, who is put through one of the most agonizing body horror mutations ever committed to the medium. The children are not our future in this.
Akira is a film about trauma. Post-war Japan is a place scarred by the bomb, repeating the mistakes of the past over and over. The kids aren’t old enough to understand the political ramifications of their time, or how they’re duplicating it through their own hunt for catharsis. It seems like the structures of power want them to behave like that. Violence is what works, whether it’s the gang wars or the army staging a coup. The only thing that can cleanse the world of this sickness is something akin to divine intervention, and that also requires an astonishing number of deaths. Millions of innocent people are wiped out by another bomb, this one of near-cosmic implications. Maybe there will be a brighter future in its wake, one situated well beyond our own realms, but now there’s another mammoth crater to fill and a lot of lessons that probably won’t be learned.
It’s fascinating how Akira ends on a hopeful note after this annihilation. To me, this time round, it read as desperately sad to the point of nihilistic. It was hard for me not to compare it to our current hellscape, which is well beyond anything Otomo could have imagined but also far stupider. It feels like everything is getting worse for no damn reason and everyone in charge is either crazy or dumb but most likely both. Is the only solution we have to fix all of this truly a hard reset with ceaseless levels of collateral damage? If that’s what it takes to kickstart the next step of humanity, so be it, right? Living in horrifying times makes you think about what’s at the bottom of that rabbit hole, and if it’s really all that terrible.
