THE FILM
Akira. Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo. Screenplay by Otomo and Izo Hashimoto, from Otomo’s manga. Music by Geinoh Yamashirogumi. Tokyo Movie Shinsha / Akira Committee. 124 min. Japan, 1988.
Spoiler warning: this review discusses the film’s ending and its central reveal.
Akira is usually filed under cyberpunk and the bomb. Neo-Tokyo, motorbikes, a city rebuilt on the crater of the last war. That reading is true, and it is also a way of not looking at what the film is actually about. Watched now, in the disclosure era, Akira is a UFO film that never shows a saucer. Its subject is the thing ufology keeps backing into: that “superpowers” and the UFO phenomenon might be the same story, and that governments have quietly decided consciousness is a weapon worth locking in a vault.
The setup, briefly. Shotaro Kaneda leads a teenage biker gang in Neo-Tokyo, 2019. His childhood friend Tetsuo Shima crashes his bike into a small, wizened child who has escaped a military facility, one of a line of psychic test subjects the government keeps sedated and numbered. The collision wakes something in Tetsuo. His latent ability comes on fast, with no training and no ceiling, and the agency that built the program cannot contain what it has set loose. Akira, subject number twenty-eight, is the precedent everyone is terrified of: a power that already levelled a city once.
Here is the part that matters. The engine of Akira is not the monster, it is the program behind it. A secret arm of the government has spent decades studying psychic children, assigning them numbers instead of names, measuring them, freezing them, and lying about all of it to the public and to most of the elected government. People treat this as pure dystopian invention. It is not. From 1972 to 1995 the American government really did run such a program. The CIA funded the original research at Stanford Research Institute, where the physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ trained “remote viewers” like Ingo Swann and Pat Price to describe places they had never seen, including, in one celebrated session, a secret Soviet weapons site from map coordinates alone. Army intelligence and then the Defense Intelligence Agency ran it, latterly under the code name Project Stargate, before the CIA closed it down in 1995. It cost around twenty million dollars and stayed classified until then. Behind it sat MKUltra, the CIA’s mind-control program, dragged into daylight by the Church Committee in 1975. Otomo began publishing Akira in 1982, while Stargate was still a live secret. He did not need the file. He guessed the shape of it.
The superpowers are the second reason this lands, and the real bridge to the UFO question. Modern UAP discourse has quietly turned away from nuts-and-bolts metal and toward consciousness. The Harvard psychiatrist John Mack spent the last fourteen years of his life documenting “experiencers,” people who described contact that expanded their awareness, bodies that seemed to vibrate at a higher frequency, telepathic and almost environmental messages left behind. Steven Greer built a whole protocol, CE-5, on the premise that you initiate contact through a state of mind. Strip the optimism out of that idea and you get Akira. Tetsuo is an experiencer with no guide and nothing benevolent on the other end, a consciousness escalating past the body that holds it. The film treats psychic ability not as a comic-book gimmick but as the load-bearing centre of a question we are still asking: is the phenomenon out there, or in here.
The cover-up closes the loop. The secret in Akira is not held by a general the President can fire. It sits inside a compartment that outlasts administrations, funded so the money cannot be followed, defended by men who believe secrecy is mercy. If that rhymes with something, it should. It is close to the structure David Grusch described to Congress in July 2023: a decades-long program walled off from oversight, parked where elected officials cannot reach it. Otomo dramatised the governance of the impossible thirty years before the hearing.
On craft the film has not dated. The hand-drawn animation still humiliates most of what came after it, the light has weight, and Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s gamelan-and-Noh score is still one of the strangest and best things ever put under a cartoon. The famous detail, that Neo-Tokyo 2019 is counting down to a 2020 Tokyo Olympics, only became eerie because Tokyo really did host in 2020, then played to empty stadiums. That is pattern-matching, not prophecy, and I will not pretend otherwise.
Because honesty is the point. Otomo’s actual source was not ufology, it was Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the postwar rubble he grew up beside, the distrust of a state that spends its own people. The UFO reading is a rhyme, not a citation, and the film proves nothing about whether any of the real cases are real.
But that rhyme is exactly why Akira is worth your evening in 2026 and not only in 1988. Long before the hearings, before the experiencer literature reached the mainstream, before the file releases, one animator independently drew the architecture the record now describes: a government that studies psychic children, an energy it cannot govern, a secret that outranks the government itself, and a question about consciousness it would rather you never ask. It still looks less like science fiction than like a myth that got the blueprint right. Watch it again, and watch what it is actually about.
References and further reading
- Akira, dir. Katsuhiro Otomo, Tokyo Movie Shinsha / Akira Committee, 1988
- Akira, manga by Katsuhiro Otomo, serialised in Young Magazine, 1982-1990
- Project Stargate (remote viewing), CIA / Defense Intelligence Agency and Stanford Research Institute, 1972-1995; declassified 1995
- Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, remote-viewing research at SRI; subjects Ingo Swann and Pat Price
- MKUltra; US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations (the Church Committee), 1975
- John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994) and Passport to the Cosmos (1999)
- Steven Greer, CE-5 / CSETI contact protocols
- David Grusch, testimony to the House Oversight subcommittee on national security, 26 July 2023