My earliest memory of Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 anime classic, came at 15, when, returning home from a night out, a friend told me with intoxicated enthusiasm that we should put on “the ...

We’re protesting in the streets, bracing for the next violent attack and debating how civil to be in confronting a government some say is wildly overreaching. There’s a reason a Japanese ...

Otomo had been a respected illustrator of manga, Japanese comics. But for "Akira," instead of trying to match his anime peers in Japan, he was working from European comic artists such as Moebius ...

In 1988, Otomo released “Akira” as an anime, a film so detailed and intricate that it took animators years to hand-paint each of the single shots used to bring the story to life. The film is ...