About a year after Akira made its Japanese debut, it started filtering into English-speaking mom-and-pop video rental shops. For a lot of Americans in the 1980s, Akira was their first real experience with adult, Japanese animation. Even with a goofy, dubbed English audio track (which famously features mispronunciations of basically every character's name), viewers instantly became fans of the soundscape of Akira – and with good reason.
Before Akira even began animating, director Katsuhiro Ôtomo reached out to composer Tsutomu Ohashi a.k.a. Shoji Yamashiro. Ôtomo, who was enamored with Yamashiro's musical collective, Geinoh Yamashirogumi, felt that the team's blending of traditional Japanese instrumentation with digital manipulation would be perfect for Akira; he was right.
What Geinoh Yamashirogumi unleashed unto the world with their Akira score is nothing short of a breathtaking masterpiece — literally since the score features deep breathing and guttural growls intense enough to wear any listener out just from hearing them. The themes the team was given to work with (since there was no movie yet) were "festival" and "requiem." What they crafted was a celebratory, apocalyptic wake; a throbbing, thumping house party set to a beat that could bring all of human history to its knees.
It's not just Akira's score that's so effective in shaking our collective teeth either — the entire soundscape of the original Japanese audio track still stands, to this day, as one of the most immersive in cinematic history. There is a sequence early on in which two dueling biker gangs race, and — if you close your eyes and just listen — you'd swear you were there, in that alternate 2019 Neo Tokyo world, motorcycle straddled between your legs on a high-speed chase toward oblivion.
