Akira: the future-Tokyo story that brought anime west

Internet lore has it that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas turned down the chance to pick up the rights to the exalted 1988 anime Akira, believing it to be unmarketable in America. Twenty years later, something had changed: Spielberg and DreamWorks were in production on a live-action remake of Ghost in the Shell, perhaps the next-biggest crossover anime title, with the beard buttering it up in the press as "one of my favourite stories". But he missed the chance to be there at the beginning for artist-director Katsuhiro Otomo's earlier masterpiece – 25 this year – when its enervating hyper-realism left retina burn in the eyes of action fans and film-makers worldwide.

Akira swiftly became midnight-movie fodder in the US, on a small release through Streamline Entertainment. Its dynamism and attention to detail – honed by Otomo in the 2,300-page manga version he published during the 80s in a Young magazine anthology – caught everyone's attention. The New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote: "The drawings of Neo-Tokyo by night are so intricately detailed that all the individual windows of huge skyscrapers appear distinct. And these night scenes glow with subtle, vibrant colour. When its characters hurtle through space, they do it with breathtaking energy."

Perhaps the metaphysical gloss applied by Otomo to his apocalyptic, future-Tokyo story – the kind of quasi-philosophical yadda-yadda that would became an anime trademark – also helped lend Akira its cult credentials. It went on release at the London's taste-making ICA (also crucial to spreading the word about J-horror several years later) in January 1991. Later that year, Streamline put the film out on VHS, and a subsidiary of Island Records followed suit in the UK; the company created Manga Entertainment to handle the release and exploit growing interest in Japanese animation.

"I started thinking [Akira] was more than a great film," Andy Frain, Manga Entertainment's founder, later recalled. "This might be a phenomenon. Were there more films like this in Japan? If so, we could treat them in music terms like Def Jam, a genre in itself."

Indeed there were more. Manga Entertainment alone handled Ninja Scroll, Battle Angel Alita, Vampire Hunter D, Death Note, Satashi Kon's Millennium Actress and Perfect Blue, and the infamous Urotsukidoji, becoming the premium anime label in the west in the process. Anime (and its print sibling, manga) arrived in the west at the right time; its thrilling sense of spatial possibilities and destructive glee showed up Disney's sentimental, character-focused approach and conservatism, as the American company slipped into its mid-90s slump. (Though Otomo had also admired Disney's professionalism when he was making Akira – he took on their practice of prerecording dialogue, which, because it slowed down the animation process, was not the norm in Japan at the time.)

Led by Akira, anime expanded the idea of what animation could be: violent, abrasive, radically stylised, thoughtful and above all, adult. It arguably readjusted expectations ahead of the later revitalisation and maturation of the industry under Pixar – sweeping away the prejudice that anything with drawings was for kids. Along with a host of other cult and alternative influences percolating into the mainstream, its presence was widely felt by the late 1990s, from the west's embrace of Pokémon fever, to tabloid moral panics, to the obvious visual transfusion received by The Matrix – which became the key touchstone for the next decade of Hollywood actioners. The Wachowskis put their debt on the record with their spin-off The Animatrix in 2003, just as Quentin Tarantino did with The Origin of O-Ren, the cartoon segment of Kill Bill Volume I.

But anime's relationship with the western mainstream was elusive – all about influence, rather than grabbing the headlines directly itself. There was a lack of true breakthrough titles to follow Akira, which eventually grossed $80m globally. Otomo himself went back to completing the Akira manga and didn't resurface with another full-length feature until 2004's Steamboy. Manga Entertainment co-produced Mamoru Oshii's $10m Ghost in the Shell, which left dropped jaws in its wake but lost money in theatres. Too many foreign distributors focused on the usual talk-heavy techno-orgies (such as Metropolis, Appleseed, Paprika), which left anime firmly mired in geek territory. Fundamentally, anime stayed niche. It was only ever worth around a quarter of a billion dollars annually in exports at its mid-noughties peak – less than most blockbuster US animations grossed solo.

The one Japanese company that broke out big, Studio Ghibli, did so by targeting the family demographic. But its films, carefully tied to the personal cult of Hayao Miyazaki, are so distinctive, so Ghibli, that they don't seem to belong with traditional anime. They're a last hurrah for hand-drawn 2D animation in an age of CGI, and there's a strain running through Ghibli that's reminiscent of vintage Disney: an emphasis on craftsmanship, a cultural nostalgia and a perfectly pitched sentimentalism. Only the first of those applies to the ruthlessly forward-looking Akira, which hits the ground running as it assembles its science-fiction apocalypse from memories of the second world war, immortalising sensory ephemera in the beats of its glorious animation. 2019 – Otomo's era of Neo-Tokyo – is just over the horizon, but Akira's futurist soul may well now be a thing of the past.

Akira is rereleased on 13 July at selected cinemas.

Next week's After Hollywood will look at English cinema's USP: bathos. Which global cinematic stories would you like to see covered in the column? Let us know in the comments below.