![Akira: The Most Expensive Anime Ever Made At The T](https://cdn.slatesource.com/0/c/a/0cadb30c-5d14-4a05-a963-d5a597d0013b.webp)

# Akira: The Most Expensive Anime Ever Made At The T

- [Made in Slatesource](https://slatesource.com/@steph/akira-the-most-expensive-anime-ever-made-at-the-t)
- By [Steph](https://slatesource.com/@steph)
- Created on Oct 1, 2026

![](https://cdn.slatesource.com/0/c/a/0cadb30c-5d14-4a05-a963-d5a597d0013b.webp)

## Akira (1988)

Otomo adapted his own unfinished manga with a hundred and sixty thousand hand painted cels and recorded the dialogue first.

Runtime

124 minutes

Director

Katsuhiro Otomo

Budget

$5.5 million

Box office

$49 million worldwide

Score

Tsutomu Ōhashi

## Animation At Feature Film Discipline

Japanese television animation had spent two decades economising: limited frame rates, held cels, mouths that move in three positions. Akira was made to the opposite specification. Around a hundred and sixty thousand cels, a palette extended with colours mixed for the film, backgrounds detailed enough to hold a close up, and prelay dialogue recorded before animation so that lip movement matches actual speech, which almost nothing in Japanese animation did at the time. The story compresses a manga Otomo had not finished writing into two hours: a motorcycle gang, a military psychic programme, and a friend whose power grows faster than his ability to hold a body together. Neo Tokyo is drawn as a city with functioning infrastructure, which is why the destruction registers.

journey·6 Entrys

# Watching Akira

Unease

/

Entry

Neo Tokyo 2019

Speeding

"A bike chase through a rebuilt city thirty one years after an explosion levelled the old one."

> Tetsuo!

What to watch for

0%

Prelay dialogue: mouths that actually match the recorded performance

The red bike slide, reshot and quoted by dozens of later films

Backgrounds detailed enough to sustain a static hold

Geinoh Yamashirogumi's score built from gamelan, taiko and Noh chorus

A city with working infrastructure so the destruction has something to destroy

The production committee included Kodansha, Toho, Bandai and others, the model that later financed most large anime features, and its budget of around a billion yen was unprecedented.

Its arrival on video in Britain and America created the Western anime market. Almost every serious distributor of Japanese animation outside Japan traces its founding to this film.

[Akira on IMDb: full cast and crew](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094625/?utm_source=slatesource)