How AKIRA Reshaped Western Cinema and Me
If you were an 80's or 90's kid with a love for anime, you probably remember Akira...
I was a late-’80s baby, which meant I came up in that narrow window where anime existed—but only barely, and never where it was supposed to. Back then it wasn’t “anime.” It was that weird cartoon from Japan. The thing you got side-eyed for. The thing you learned, very early, not to bring up unless you were prepared to defend yourself or be laughed out of the room.
I watched it anyway.
I talked about it anyway.
And I paid for it in the small, grinding ways kids always do—snickers in the hallway, the dismissive why do you watch that?, the unspoken understanding that liking this thing marked you as different. Not dangerous. Not cool. Just… other.
Finding it was half the battle. There were no clean shelves. No streaming services. No friendly algorithms quietly nudging you toward the next obsession. If you wanted anime in the early to mid ’90s, you hunted it. You dug through flea markets and swap meets, through sun-bleached VHS tapes stacked on folding tables run by old ladies who didn’t quite know what they had—and didn’t care. Sometimes you’d spot a familiar cover, your heart kicking hard, only to realize it was the wrong volume. Or worse, the wrong language. Or recorded off television with half the episode missing and commercials burned into the tape like scars.
Most days, you left empty-handed.
And on the drive home, you wondered—quietly, bitterly—why you ever got into this shit in the first place.
Anime, back then, was scarcity and longing. It was fragments. It was rumor and hearsay and secondhand descriptions traded like contraband. And every now and then, if the universe felt generous, you’d be walking through the back aisle of a KB Toys and there it would be—a lone Dragon Ball action figure hanging crooked on a peg like it had been forgotten on purpose.
You’d grab it without hesitation.
Even if it was Krillin.
Especially if it was Krillin.
Because it meant it was real. It meant you hadn’t imagined the whole thing. It meant someone else knew.
Over time, things loosened. Toonami arrived like a transmission from another world. Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh cracked the door wider. The stigma didn’t vanish, not really, but it softened. Anime went from that Japanese cartoon to oh yeah, I’ve seen that one. Fast-forward to now and everyone watches something—one series, one movie, one gateway drug they swear doesn’t count.
But back then?
Back then it was the wild west.
An era of dust and discovery. Of half-truths and whispered recommendations. The people who knew where to get the good stuff didn’t advertise it. They wore black hats and darker coats, leaned against the metaphorical saloon wall, and if they liked you—really liked you—they’d jerk their chin toward some shadowed alley and tell you, quietly, where the real thing lived.
But some of us knew better.
Because threaded through all that hunger and secrecy, all that watching whatever scraps you could find just to feel closer to it, there was talk of something else. A presence. A name spoken carefully, if at all. A mysterious stranger said to haunt the edges of the medium—not just shaping anime, but changing it.
And rewriting the rules of the west itself.
Akira...
I had heard about it long before I ever had the chance to see it.
At school lunch tables, it sounded like exaggeration. Like mythmaking. And seeing it for yourself was something else entirely.
Akira felt like the band you weren’t supposed to listen to, or the drink you weren’t supposed to know existed. If you hadn’t seen it, it sounded like something older kids invented to feel dangerous, to feel ahead of you. And it worked—because even the name Akira carried a warning. The kind your parents didn’t need explained. Not this one. Pick something else.
And, honestly?
They were right.
Akira hit the West like a quiet nuclear detonation while I was still three or four years old. The blast wasn’t immediate, but the fallout lingered, spreading over the next decade until animated film no longer looked the same.
It didn’t announce itself. It slipped in sideways.
There was no campaign welcoming it, no effort to explain what it meant or soften the edges. It arrived like contraband—copied VHS tapes passed between hands, colors degrading with every generation, sound warping just enough to make the violence feel more intimate. You weren’t meant to be watching it, and that knowledge soaked into every frame.
You didn’t find Akira by accident.
Someone brought you to it.
Someone older, leaning in close, asking if you’d heard about it like they were sharing a crime. They never talked about its ideas or its history. Not to kids. They talked about moments. The arm. The blood. The way it didn’t feel like a cartoon.
Because it didn’t.
That was the break. The point where the illusion collapsed.
Western animation had rules, even when it pretended to push them. Damage was temporary. Pain was symbolic. Everything reset. Akira rejected that logic entirely. Destruction lingered. Bodies failed. Power corrupted instead of elevating. Nothing snapped back into place.
And all of it was animated—deliberately, seriously, without apology. The film carried itself like it had nothing to prove and no interest in being liked. It challenged you to keep dismissing it after what it showed you.
The city wasn’t scenery; it rotted. Authority wasn’t guiding; it panicked. Kids weren’t protected; they were armed, angry, and expendable. Power arrived without destiny attached, blooming into sickness, seizures, and loss of self. The ending offered no comfort, no explanation—just aftermath.
Akira trusted the audience to live with that discomfort.
The shockwave spread slowly. It didn’t overhaul Saturday mornings. It didn’t suddenly make studios bold. Instead, it lodged itself in the minds of creators—kids who saw it too early, artists who realized animation could carry real weight. That it could be political, cruel, erotic, grotesque, and beautiful all at once.
A question took root and refused to die.
Over the next decade, the influence surfaced everywhere. Adult animation that wasn’t comedic. Darker science fiction. Cyberpunk bleeding into Western visuals. Music videos, album art, ruined cities, psychic violence, bodies unraveling under forces they were never meant to contain.
Even people who never watched Akira felt it.
Its fingerprints were everywhere—red motorcycles, neon sprawl, secret governments, children carrying godlike power without the maturity to survive it. Animation that lingered on pain instead of cutting away.
Akira didn’t just introduce something new.
It removed something old.
After Akira, pretending animation was harmless stopped working. Calling it a stepping stone to “real” cinema rang hollow. That argument had already been destroyed, quietly and completely, by something that never bothered to justify itself.
For those of us who grew up hearing about it before we ever saw it—who carried its reputation like a dare—it became more than a film.
It became a line.
A before and an after.
And once you crossed it, you never looked at cartoons the same way again.
I think we finally got cable sometime around ’95, ’96—maybe ’97. It blurs together now. I was just a dumb kid, eight or ten years old, barely aware of how big a deal that actually was. Dates didn’t matter.
What mattered was Toonami.
Dragon Ball and Gundam Wing hit me like a switch being flipped. Every day after school, those two shows made the previous eight hours of uninterrupted, institutional misery feel survivable. I didn’t have the language for it yet. I didn’t understand why it worked.
I just knew I loved it.
I still do. Dragon Ball didn’t just entertain me—it shaped me. The way I think about effort, growth, failure, endurance. Gundam Wing went deeper, quieter. It lodged itself somewhere in my brain as a storyteller, teaching me—long before I realized it—about perspective, about conflict, about how ideology scars people just as much as violence does.
And even that wasn’t enough.
I needed more.
Thank God for the Sci-Fi Channel.
Every New Year’s Eve meant a 24-hour Twilight Zone marathon. No countdowns, no parties—just eerie music, moral dread, and the sense that the universe was bigger and crueler than anyone wanted to admit. Back then, Sci-Fi still played the good stuff. Horror films. Dark science fiction. The kind of movies regular cable barely tolerated.
It was cool. And more than that—it was one of the only things my dad and I actually shared.
We didn’t talk much. Not really. He spent most of his time glued to the news, obsessing over disasters and politics and things he had absolutely no power to change. But the Sci-Fi Channel cut through that. We could sit in the same room and watch something strange together without having to explain ourselves.
There were a lot of great shows and movies on that channel in those years, and when my dad wasn’t spiraling into headlines, that’s where I lived.
That is where I saw this ad:
I knew exactly one thing.
Saturday nights were about to become a portal.
What I didn’t know was that I wasn’t coming back.
And of course—
Akira.
Every Saturday night, I stayed up until two, three, sometimes four in the morning, soaking in as much of it as my small, overstimulated brain could handle. I watched everything they gave me. I didn’t curate. I didn’t skip. I absorbed. These movies are burned into my memory so clearly I can still feel the glow of the TV in a dark room, still hear the hum of the VCR rewinding.
I recorded every single Saturday onto VHS just so I could watch them again. And again. And again.
Project A-Ko, especially. I watched it so many times that, as a pre-teen kid with no friends, I created an imaginary one—A-Ko herself. She stuck around for years. Not as a joke. Not as a phase. As a companion, born straight out of repetition and loneliness and affection.
Those films taught me everything before I even knew I was learning. How stories moved. How horror lingered. How action could feel operatic. How drama could sit quietly and still devastate. How characters and worlds could exist beyond the frame, breathing long after the credits rolled.
Anime pierced the creative layer of my soul and took root there, growing into something that would eventually define who I became—something I would never have been without it.
But Akira…
Akira took it further.
Akira was a fucking riot.
Akira was a self-contained nuclear device, placed directly into the hands of an eight-year-old boy—and that is exactly what it felt like.
I walked around afterward like Oppenheimer, carrying the knowledge of the bomb in my head. The destruction of the world and its hubris sat there with me, humming quietly. I knew what it could do. I knew how it broke people. I knew where it failed. And somehow, in my child’s brain, that knowledge felt like power.
That’s what watching Akira did to you.
If my dad had known, he would’ve taken the VHS away. If the kids at school had known, I would’ve been branded a weirdo. But inside my own head, I was untouchable. Stronger than all of them. Because they hadn’t seen it.
They didn’t know.
I did.
And if it shaped me that way—if it rewired me as a writer and a creator thirty years ago—I have no doubt that other seven- and eight-year-old kids who watched Akira back then felt the same ignition.
Something flips.
A switch deep in the brain. A permission switch.
Suddenly, the door is open.
You’re not just coloring outside the lines anymore—you’re using different colors, on a different surface, with a completely different understanding of what the word allowed even means. And no one is there to tell you no.
That’s what creativity—real creativity—is.
It pushes envelopes until they tear, shatters boundaries, changes an art form—and then uses that changed form to infect everything else. It spreads like a parasite made of color, leaving nothing untouched.
That’s what ’90s anime was.
And Akira?
Akira was the epicenter.
It’s there—in the bodies hitting pavement too hard, in the city as an organism, in power manifesting as something invasive and uncontrollable. Look for it in Inception, in the way reality folds in on itself and the mind becomes both weapon and prison. In Arrival, where knowledge rewires time and understanding becomes a kind of burden. In Blade Runner 2049, where scale, silence, and identity all press down like weight.
You can feel it in Darren Aronofsky’s films—in obsession taken to its logical, horrifying end. In Samurai Jack and Primal, where silence does more work than dialogue and violence has consequence. In Bruce Timm’s Batman, where animation stopped pretending it was soft. In Daft Punk’s visuals, in their fascination with isolation, machinery, and transcendence. In most modern video games, whether they know it or not—ruined cities, psychic powers, body horror, the loneliness of scale.
Akira is everywhere.
Not as imitation, not as homage you can always point to, but as a permission slip that never expired.
It convinced an entire generation of writers, filmmakers, mangaka, animators, and artists that there were no ceilings. That genre wasn’t a cage. That medium wasn’t a limitation. That animation didn’t have to explain itself, science fiction didn’t have to comfort you, and stories didn’t owe anyone safety.
Akira didn’t just influence style—it changed mindset.
It whispered something dangerous and intoxicating to anyone paying attention: You don’t have to ask. You can go further. You can break things. You can let stories be messy, brutal, unfinished. You can trust the audience to feel instead of understand. You can build worlds that don’t apologize for existing.
That idea spread. Quietly. Relentlessly.
And if you were there—if you were a kid sitting too close to a television at two in the morning, VHS tape spinning, parents asleep, absorbing something you knew you weren’t supposed to see—you didn’t just watch Akira.
You carried it.
You still do.
You’ll know why.
Some bombs never stop going off.
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