Akira

Akira started as a manga, not a film. Katsuhiro Otomo began serializing it in 1982, building out a sprawling cyberpunk Neo-Tokyo years before the movie condensed the story down to a two-hour runtime. The 1988 film adaptation, which Otomo directed himself, is the version most people know, and it was, at the time, the most expensive anime film ever produced. That budget shows in ways that still hold up: the hand-drawn animation uses far more individual frames per second of motion than standard anime practice of the era, which is part of why the movement in Akira still looks unusually fluid decades later.

Akira didn't just influence anime. It's one of the direct visual ancestors of cyberpunk as a mainstream aesthetic, full stop. Neon-lit sprawl, biker gangs, corporate decay, body horror mixed with technology: a huge amount of what The Matrix, Stranger Things, and modern cyberpunk media borrow visually traces straight back to Akira's Neo-Tokyo.

The film also functioned as a lot of Western audiences' first real exposure to anime as a serious medium rather than kids' programming, landing in North America at a moment when almost nobody outside dedicated fan circles had a frame of reference for it.

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