1988 animated film directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, adapted from his own manga serialised in Young Magazine between 1982 and 1990. Neo-Tokyo, 2019. A teenage biker crashes into an escaped child from a military facility and inherits an ability that arrives with no training and no ceiling; the secret arm of government that built the programme cannot contain what it has set loose.
The programme, not the monster
The engine of the film is the institution behind it: an arm of the state that has spent decades studying psychic children, numbering them instead of naming them, and lying about it to the public and to most of the elected government. Otomo began serialising in 1982, while the American version of that programme was live and classified. The CIA funded the original work at SRI under Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, with Ingo Swann and Pat Price as subjects; Army intelligence and then the DIA ran it, latterly as the Stargate Program, until the CIA closed it in 1995. Behind that sat MKUltra, dragged into daylight by the Church Committee in 1975. Otomo did not have the file. He guessed the shape of it.
The consciousness reading
Tetsuo is an experiencer with no guide and nothing benevolent on the other end. The film treats psychic ability as the load-bearing centre of the question the modern record keeps circling, whether the phenomenon is out there or in here, which is the ground John E. Mack worked in his clinical study of Experiencers and the premise CE-5 is built on. Its cover-up is a compartment that outlasts administrations and is funded so the money cannot be followed, close in shape to what David Grusch described to Congress in July 2023.
What it is not
Otomo’s subject was Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the postwar rubble he grew up beside, not ufology. The correspondence is a rhyme, not a citation, and the film is evidence for nothing. Reviewed on this site in June 2026.
Connections
Stargate Program · Remote Viewing · SRI · Hal Puthoff · Russell Targ · Ingo Swann · Pat Price · MKUltra · Church Committee · John E. Mack · Experiencers · CE-5 · David Grusch · Legacy Program · Ghost in the Shell