Akira (manga) - Reception

Reception

The series has won a great deal of recognition in the industry, including the 1984 Kodansha Manga Award for best general manga. It was also nominated for the Harvey Award for Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work in 2002. In her book The Fantastic in Japanese Literature, Susan Napier described the work as a "no holds barred enjoyment of fluidity and chaos". The work is credited as having introduced both manga and anime to Western audiences. The translation of the work into French in 1991 by Glénat "opened the floodgates to the Japanese invasion." The imagery in Akira, together with that of Blade Runner formed the blueprint for similar Japanese works of a dystopian nature of the late 1990s. Examples include Ghost in the Shell and Armitage III. Akira cemented Otomo's reputation and the success of the animated feature allowed him to concentrate on film rather than the manga form in which his career began.

The movie led the way for the growing popularity of anime in the West, with Akira considered to have been the trailblazer for the second wave of anime fandom that began in the early 1990s. One of the reasons for the movie's success was the highly advanced quality of its animation. At the time, most anime was 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 meticulously detailed scenes, exactingly lip-synched dialogue — a first for an anime production (voices were recorded before the animation was completed, rather than the opposite) — and super-fluid motion as realized in the film's more than 160,000 animation cels.