Artist-writer Katsuhiro Omoto began telling the story of Akira as a comic book series in 1982 but took a break from 1986 to 1988 to write, direct, supervise and design this animated film version. Set in 2019, the film richly imagines the new metropolis of Neo-Tokyo, which is designed from huge buildings down to the smallest details of passing vehicles or police uniforms. Two disaffected orphan teenagers--slight, resentful Tetsuo and confident, breezy Kanada--run with a biker gang, but trouble grows when Tetsuo start to resent the way Kanada always has to rescue him. Meanwhile, a group of scientists, military men and politicians wonder what to do with a collection of withered children who possess enormous psychic powers, especially the mysterious, rarely seen Akira, whose awakening might well have caused the end of the old world. Tetsuo is visited by the children, who trigger the growth of psychic and physical powers that might make him a superman or a super-monster.

As befits a distillation of 1,318 pages of the story so far, Akira is overstuffed with character, incident and detail. However, it piles up astonishing set pieces: the chases and shoot-outs (amazingly kinetic, amazingly bloody) benefit from minute cartoon detail that extends to the surprised or shocked faces of the tiniest extra; the Tetsuo monster alternately looks like a billion-gallon scrotal sac or a Tex Avery mutation of the monster from The Quatermass Experiment; and the finale--which combines flashbacks to more innocent days with a destruction of Neo City and the creation of a new universe--is one of the most mind bending in all sci-fi cinema. --Kim Newman

On the DVD: as befits this film's status as a Manga classic, Akira has a wide selection of extras spread across two discs, including a "Making of Akira" documentary, a photo gallery, a quiz and a "Make your own trailer" feature, as well as one hidden feature on each disc. The film has been digitally remastered and presented in widescreen format, with Dolby Digital 5.1 for the English-dubbed version, and Dolby Digital 2.0 for the original Japanese language version. The only disappointment of the disc is the animated Scene Selection, where the clips are rendered so small that they can be a bit difficult to decipher. --Rob Burrow