Some news worth clearing your calendar for. On September 4th, Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira is coming back to theaters across the United States and Canada in 4K and IMAX, with Crunchyroll and Sony Pictures handling the release. Both versions are along for the ride, too, the original Japanese with English subtitles and the English dub, so you can watch it however you first fell for it, or however you want to meet it for the very first time.
If a 1988 anime getting the full IMAX treatment sounds like a big deal, that's because it kind of is. This is the 4K restoration that first hit screens back in 2020, and it already played the UK before this North American run, per Crunchyroll's announcement. Tickets weren't on sale yet when the news broke, with availability expected to roll out over the back half of summer, so treat this as your early heads-up rather than a mad dash.
I remember the first time watching Akira in the '90s, thanks to the local Blockbuster and our family's faithful VHS player. It absolutely blew my mind. I hadn't ever seen anything animated that way before. Everything I had seen prior was created for children, and there was no doubt that Akira was for an adult audience. I instantly became an anime fan.
Here's the quick version, for anyone who hasn't seen it! Akira takes place in Neo-Tokyo in 2019, a neon megacity rebuilt after a mysterious blast leveled the old one. The story follows Kaneda, the cocky leader of a teenage biker gang, and his friend Tetsuo, who survives a crash and starts developing psychic powers he can't begin to control. It's loud, it's kinetic, and it gets stranger and bigger the longer it runs. Otomo adapted it from his own sprawling manga, which he'd been drawing since 1982, so the film is really a compression of a much larger story.
What Makes Akira A Landmark
Some Akira history worth knowing: the film was, by the standards of its day, enormous. Its budget has been reported at around ¥700 million, which made it one of the most expensive anime productions of its era, and that money is right there on the screen in ways that still hold up almost forty years later. The figure most often cited is more than 160,000 hand-painted cels, an absurd amount of detail for a feature made largely by hand.
One production choice still gets talked about. Otomo pre-scored the movie, meaning the dialogue was recorded first and the characters' mouths were animated to match the actual voice track, the reverse of how most anime was made back then. That's a big part of why the lip-sync and the timing feel so precise, and why the whole thing carries a weight that the TV animation of the era simply didn't.
For a lot of Western fans, Akira is the movie where anime stopped being a niche curiosity. When it reached the US and UK around the turn of the 1990s, it showed a generation of viewers that animation could be adult, dense, and truly cinematic, and it's widely credited as one of the films that cracked the mainstream door open for everything that came after. Plenty of you reading AnimeMojo can probably trace your fandom back to it, whether you realized it at the time or not.
And its fingerprints are everywhere. That shot of Kaneda's red bike screeching to a sideways stop, the one people now call the "Akira slide," has been homaged in so many movies, shows, and games that you've almost certainly seen the tribute before you ever saw the original.
Otomo's manga became a landmark in its own right, running for years and finishing well after the film came out. You can draw a pretty clean line from Neo-Tokyo to a huge chunk of the sci-fi that came after it, from the look of the cities to the way the stories treat technology and power.
How To Watch It On September 4th
If you've never seen it, this is close to the ideal way in. Akira was built to overwhelm a big screen, and a 4K restoration with IMAX sound is about as far from a laptop stream as you can get. Pick whichever audio you like, the sub is the purist's choice and the dub really holds up, and don't stress about catching every plot thread on the first pass. A lot of Akira is meant to be felt as much as it's meant to be followed.
So keep an eye out for tickets as we move into August, and if a 1988 movie in IMAX sounds like a strange pick for a night out, trust that it earns the format. Nearly four decades on, almost nothing else looks or moves quite like it.
Don't want to wait until August to watch it? Crunchyroll has it available for streaming!
Are you making the trip for this one? If you've already seen Akira, tell me whether you're going sub or dub this time around.
Let us know down in the comments.
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