The best-looking animated film of all time is 20 years old this summer. On July 16, 1988, Japanese fans lined up to buy tickets for the blockbuster anime of the decade, a movie called Akira

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Okay, sure, the "best-looking" part is a reasonably debatable point. Fans of Disney's pre-war classics can make a pretty strong argument for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was produced back when animators worked cheap and were easy to exploit. It's also hard to draw a direct comparison between 2D animation and the new-school 3D CG we've seen in productions by Pixar and Dreamworks.At the very least, though, we're talking one of the top three, top five animation accomplishments of all time, and as far as traditional 2D productions made in Japan, nothing comes within shouting distance. Akira broke so much new ground that nobody's been able to catch up since, not for two decades and probably not for even more.Yet this movie will spend its 20th birthday out of print in America. It's not that hard to find on the secondary market, but it's still a hell of a shame when one of the high-water marks of Japanese animation is suddenly gone from store shelves.There's only so much the fifth estate can do about that, though. Hopefully, we'll see Akira make a comeback on home video – a high-definition version on Blu-ray disc would be lovely, thanks – and in the meantime, here's a little tribute on the anniversary of its arrival.1982 was a heady year for science fiction. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and John Carpenter's The Thing opened on the same day, the 25th of June. Tron followed less than a month later, delivering a second shot of Syd Mead's futuristic design work. William Gibson published some of his first cyberpunk short stories, which would lay the foundation for Neuromancer a couple of years later. And at the very end of the year, on December 20, a new serial appeared in Kodansha's Young Magazine. From a distance, the title spread looked like blood spatter on a concrete wall. Up close, the image resolved into a bird's-eye view of Tokyo.This was the first chapter of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira , and it was definitely something new. The style was rooted in the realistic, hard-boiled gekiga comics of the '70s, but there were touches of European comics in there as well, the fantasies of artists like Moebius and other contributors to the influential Metal Hurlant magazine. There's plenty of design influence from America as well -- it's hard to look at Akira and not see Syd Mead's fingerprints here and there, from the dark skyline of Blade Runner and the light-cycles in Tron.The early '80s were the heyday of punk rock – one of the subjects of Otomo's earlier strip Sayonara Nippon – which showed in Akira's tale of political turmoil and delinquents running wild in the streets. In America these days, we mainly remember the conservative backlash of the Reagan revolution, but '81 and '82 were also the years of Solidarity in Poland, riots in England, civil war in Lebanon, and generally more than enough revolution to go around. The Cold War was still very much on the boil, too – it was perfectly easy to believe that the bomb could drop on Tokyo and kick off World War III by the end of the decade.Akira's often pegged as an example of Gibson's cyberpunk movement, and it does share a few of the genre's most famous features. It has the dystopian future, the crumbling urban sprawl, and the rebellious anti-heroes. Behind all that, though, it's built on ideas that have been popular throughout decades of science fiction. It's really a story about transcendence – about the next step in human evolution, and what happens afterward.It's also about how Kaneda has the coolest motorcycle ever crafted by human hands. So it works on a couple of different levels.