1988. A white dome of light swallows Tokyo, and the explosion sets off a third world war.

2019. A new city stands on the ruins. Neo-Tokyo is dazzling: skyscrapers, neon, motorways full of light!

But it is also rotten underneath. Protests in the streets, cults preaching the end of the world, corrupt politicians and teenage biker gangs fighting each other through the night like Batman and The Joker, in a city too broken to discern who is who.

On the surface, it's science fiction. But the explosion that opens Akira had already happened once.

In 1945. In Hiroshima.

Akira is a film about a nation destroyed by a power it didn't understand, one that rebuilt itself at full speed, without processing the trauma, obsessed with progress.

— Japan, The Miracle & Its Shadow —

In a few decades, a country in ashes became the second-largest economy on the planet. By the 1980s, when Katsuhiro Ōtomo was making Akira, Japan was the future: the electronics, the cars, the cities of light everyone else wanted to become.

Neo-Tokyo has all of that. What makes Akira special is that it looks at what the miracle left out.

Almost everything in the film's dark side was real. Biker gangs of bored, angry teenagers, the bōsōzoku, were a genuine phenomenon in 70s and 80s Japan. Ōtomo grew up during the violent student protests of the 1960s. Bribery scandals reached the top of government. Even the cults turned out to be prophetic: in 1995, a doomsday sect attacked the Tokyo subway with sarin gas.

So the chaos of Neo-Tokyo isn't the opposite of the Japanese miracle. It's just its shadow, stretched long and dripping down into the drains. Akira works like a warning: if you keep building on top of the crater without ever looking into it, this is what grows underneath.

A few years after the film came out, Japan's economic bubble burst and the country entered what it still calls its "lost decade". The miracle had an expiry date. Akira seems to have sensed it.

— Akira As The Atom —

Most first-time viewers spend the film waiting for Akira to appear, or thinking it's Kaneda, when it's more the concept than the person that matters.

Before the war, the government experimented on children to awaken psychic powers. Akira was the child who went further than any of them. His power broke loose, and he was the one who destroyed Tokyo in 1988. What's left of him is kept in frozen jars, sealed under the new Olympic stadium, the monument Neo-Tokyo is building to show the world how far it has come. The progress sits directly on top of the catastrophe, and nobody wants to look down.

So Akira isn't a villain or a saviour. He's the name we give to a power no human being can hold. At one point, Kei explains to Kaneda that this energy is in everything, like atoms. Even the simplest living things carry it. The difference, she says, is that "amoebas don't make motorcycles and atomic bombs."

That's the whole film in one line. The energy was always there. The danger is what people decide to do with it before they can understand it.

And everyone in Neo-Tokyo wants to do something with it. The army fears Akira and wants to keep him buried. The cults worship him as a messiah who will come back to purify the city. The rebels hunt him as a weapon to bring the government down. Each of them sees in Akira exactly what they want to see, the way a whole era looked at the atom and saw salvation, energy or annihilation.

When Akira finally appears at the end, he isn't a god or a monster. He's just a little boy. That might be the film's cruellest idea: the power that levelled a city was placed inside a child, by adults who never stopped to ask what it would do to him.

— Children To An Orphaned Country —

Look closely at Neo-Tokyo and you'll notice something: there are no fathers in it.

The anime scholar Susan Napier pointed out that absent fathers run all through postwar Japanese storytelling, and with good reason. Many Japanese children really did lose their fathers in the war. And the whole country lost its symbolic father too: before 1945, the emperor was treated as the head of the Japanese nation as one great family. Defeat took that away.

In Akira, the only adults with power are the army and the scientists. They don't protect children. They use them.

The clearest image of this is the three strange children at the heart of the film: Takashi, Kiyoko and Masaru. They have children's bodies and old people's faces, because they've spent decades sedated, medicated and locked away as part of the same programme that created Akira. They never got to grow up. They're the children of a country without parents, raised by the state as weapons.

And unlike everyone else in the film, they know exactly what this power can do. That's why they're afraid of it.

— Tetsuo: The Unhealed Wound —

Tetsuo is subject number 41, the newest in the programme, another child picked up by the same adults who made Akira. But what matters about him isn't his power, it's his hurt. He grew up an orphan in Kaneda's shadow. In a world without fathers, Tetsuo only ever had someone to look up to, and it made him feel smaller.

Then, out of nowhere, he's handed an immense power, with no time to understand it and no one to teach him how to carry it. In Tetsuo's hands, it doesn't heal anything. It amplifies everything he already was: the envy, the resentment, the need to prove he's no longer the little one. He wants Kaneda's bike, he wants no one to ever give him orders again, he wants the world to finally see him.

In that sense, Tetsuo is Neo-Tokyo in a single body. Like the city, he never stops to look at the wound. He just grows over it, faster and bigger, until the growth itself becomes the catastrophe.

— Kaneda: The Human Anchor —

Kaneda looks like the typical action hero: cocky, impulsive, riding that red bike. But his role is the opposite of everyone else's. While everyone fights to control Akira, Kaneda just wants his friend back.

He's the human facing the absolute. In a city where the adults use children as weapons, he's the only one who does what a family should: he shows up. He's far from perfect: his morals haven't come out of that chaos unscathed, his loyalty is clumsy, and his affection never quite finds the right words. But it's the one thing in Neo-Tokyo that isn't about power.

Kaneda isn't the perfect solution. He's the only answer to the wound the film dares to give. It's stopping long enough to see the suffering hiding behind all that power. It's a modest hope, but it's the only thing in the film that doesn't end up leading to destruction.

At the very end, when Tetsuo has become a monster, he screams Kaneda's name, and that's all that's left of him: the kid who needed Kaneda. That's the real tragedy of Akira. Kaneda was always his protector, and what was love, Tetsuo lived as humiliation.

— The Two Craters —

Akira begins with a crater and ends with another.

In the finale, the children wake Akira to stop Tetsuo, and a new explosion swallows the centre of Neo-Tokyo. But this time something is different. In 1988, the power broke loose with no one to guide it. In 2019, the children go in with it, guide it inward, and something new is born.

The city is in ruins again. But this time, the people left standing are the ones who never wanted power at all: Kaneda and his friends. A new generation, ready to rebuild, and unlike the last one, fully aware of what lies beneath the crater.

That's what makes Akira more than a beautiful film. Every frame carries the weight of something real: a country that was destroyed by a power it didn't understand, rebuilt itself without looking back, and turned its wound into one of the most striking stories ever animated.

The question the film leaves open is the same one Japan faced in 1945.