Akira

Otomo adapted his own manga, and did it while the manga was still running. The serial ran 1982 to 1990; the film arrived in 1988 with six years of story to compress and an ending that did not exist yet. What that produces is unusual for an adaptation: the film is not a reduction of a finished work but a second version by the same author, with Tetsuo's arc pulled forward, the Colonel's role enlarged and the manga's long post-Akira reconstruction gone entirely. Otomo then finished the manga differently.

Masashi Kishimoto has named Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira as the manga that changed how he drew, alongside Toriyama's Dragon Ball. What he has said he took from it is the realistic, precisely drawn backgrounds and a sense of weight in the art, which he contrasted with the simpler styles he had been copying before.

Tezuka built the industry Otomo works in, and the inheritance is formal before it is anything else: the cinematic page, with panels used as shots, long wordless sequences and motion carried across a spread. Before Tezuka that was not how comics in Japan were drawn. The subject descends too. Astro Boy is a manufactured child with power beyond its keepers, built by a scientist who wanted his dead son back, and the stories are about what the state does with him. Tetsuo is that premise with the sentiment removed. Filed MEDIUM: foundational rather than specific, and Otomo is on record reacting against the roundness of the Tezuka style as much as inheriting from it.