Otomo has named Mad Max among the films behind Akira, and the borrowing is the gangs: customised bikes as a subculture's entire identity, a wasteland where fuel and road are the only economy, and violence staged as motion rather than as combat. Kaneda's bike and the running battles with the Clowns are the clearest debt, and the light-trail slide that became the most imitated shot in animation is a motorcycle stunt filmed the way Miller films them. Filed MEDIUM: the post-apocalypse itself is a shared genre rather than a borrowing, and Neo-Tokyo is a rebuilt city rather than Miller's emptied one.