Akira (film) - Production

Production

While working on the original manga, Akira, creator Katsuhiro Otomo agreed to an anime adaptation of the series provided he retained creative control. This insistence was based on his experiences working on Harmagedon. The Akira Committee was the name given to a partnership of several major Japanese entertainment companies brought together to realize production of an Akira film. The group's assembly was necessitated by the unconventionally high budget of around ¥1,100,000,000, intended to achieve the desired epic standard equal to Otomo's over 2,000 page manga tale. The committee consisted of publisher Kodansha Ltd., Mainichi Broadcasting System, Inc., Bandai Co., Ltd., Hakuhodo Incorporated, distributor Toho Co., Ltd., Laserdisc Corporation, Sumitomo Corporation and animation producer Tokyo Movie Shinsha Co., Ltd.

Most anime is notorious for cutting production corners with limited motion, such as having only the characters' mouths move while their faces remained static. Akira broke from this trend with detailed scenes, pre-scored dialogue (wherein the dialogue is recorded before the film starts production and the movements of the characters' lips are animated to match it) – a first for an anime production – and super-fluid motion as realized in the film's more than 160,000 animation cels. Unlike its live-action predecessors, Akira also had the budget to show a fully realized futuristic Tokyo.

The teaser trailer for Akira was released in 1987. The film was completed and released in 1988, two years before the manga officially ended in 1990. Otomo had great difficulty completing the manga; he has stated that the inspiration for its conclusion arose from a conversation that he had with Alejandro Jodorowsky in 1990. Otomo later recalled that the film project had to begin with the writing of an ending that would bring suitable closure to major characters, storylines, and themes without being extraordinarily lengthy, so that he could know in reverse order which manga elements would make the cut into the anime and thus suitably resolve the manga's various elements into a lean, two-hour story.

Katsuhiro Otomo is a big fan of Tetsujin 28-go. As a result, his naming conventions match the characters featured in Tetsujin 28-go: Kaneda shares his name with the protagonist of Tetsujin 28-go; Colonel Shikishima shares his name with Professor Shikishima of Tetsujin 28-go, while Tetsuo is named after Shikishima's son Tetsuo Shikishima; Akira's Ryūsaku is named after Ryūsaku Murasame. In addition, Takashi has a "26" tattooed on his hand which closely resembles the font used in Tetsujin 28-go. The namesake of the series, Akira, is the 28th in a line of psychics that the government has developed, the same number as Tetsujin-28.

The sound of Kaneda's bike engine was produced by compositing the engine sound of a 1929 Harley-Davidson motorcycle with a jet engine.

Katsuhiro Otomo decried his fame and said that his conclusion of Akira was false in both the Japanese and American editions, and that he could never truly finish his epic. Nevertheless, Otomo's Akira is widely considered a masterpiece of graphic storytelling.