How 'Batman: The Animated Series' And 'Akira' Are Forever Connected

This article contains spoilers for Akira and the Batman-centric DCAU films and TV shows.A giant explosion of light and sound. Biker gangs and crime-ridden streets. A city run by crooked politicians and a militarized police force. A flawed hero who operates outside the law and is pitted against a villain who thrives on chaos. All these make Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, the spinoff film of Batman: The Animated Series, one of the most iconic representations of the DC Comics hero ever put to a screen, but they're also major parts of what make the legendary anime film Akira tick, too.Both films celebrated big anniversaries last year — Phantasm turned 25 on December 25, and Akira crested its 30th birthday on July 16 — and they're both still widely respected as classics of their respective art forms. It's not an exaggeration to say Katsuhiro Otomo, creator of the Akira manga and director of the film, influenced a generation of artists around the world, and you can say the same for the film's version of Batman created by Bruce Timm, Eric Radomski, and Alan Burnett.What's harder to pin down is what the two iconic movies have in common. While they couldn't be more different plotwise, both films share a lot of DNA that showed up not just Phantasm's source TV series Batman: The Animated Series, but the rest of the DC Animated Universe properties for years to come. There's clear homage to Akira, yes, but over the years the B:TAS spinoff properties have also borrowed its animators and — most importantly — ideas that enrich how we understand the character today.

There's no question when you watch the clips side by side. Phantasm features a flashback scene where a young Bruce Wayne (still not graduated into Batman yet) fights off a gang of criminals on the street while he's out on the town with his lady friend, Andrea Beaumont. Bruce takes out one of the goons on a motorcycle, and the framing mimics the way Akira's hero Kaneda takes out a rival biker in that film. Bruce punches and Kaneda kicks, but the shots are otherwise the same: protagonist runs toward bike on foot, cut to biker, cut back to protagonist's foot stepping on the bike's front fender and connecting to hit the biker in the face, cut to wider slow-motion shot of the hit, cut to the bike careening off to a crash.When presented with the clips side by side, a Warner Bros. representative told /Film that any similarities between Akira and Phantasm specifically were purely coincidental — citing instead The Godfather, the 1940s Fleischer Superman cartoons, and Tim Burton's Batman as the Phantasm producers' primary influences. Nonetheless, the similarities to Akira are clear, and they go deeper than aesthetics. In both scenes an angry male protagonist, accompanied by a young woman, intervenes in a situation that — at first — shouldn't involve him. Bruce's sense of justice can't stomach seeing a civilian robbed, and Kaneda's protectiveness for his friend Tetsuo drives him to act when he sees Tetsuo getting attacked by the rival bike gang. They're character-building moments early enough in their respective narratives that reinforce Bruce and Kaneda's toxic masculinity and their tendency to resort to what the theologian and cultural theorist Walter Wink would later call "the myth of redemptive violence" to solve problems.

For much of Phantasm and Akira, Wink's (arguably reductive) view of pop-culture heroes applies to both Batman and Kaneda: "An indestructible hero is doggedly opposed to an irreformable and equally indestructible villain." And that classification may be true for some heroes, but neither film leaves it at that. By the end of Akira, Kaneda has watched his friend turn into a monster thanks to bad luck and scientific malpractice and transcend the mortal plane. By the end of Phantasm, Batman is heartbroken that Andrea — his one chance at long-term happiness and a woman he had proposed to — has succumbed to the same forces that drove him to violence. The broad lesson in both is that violence and the human tendency toward hate beget more of the same.

One of those artists who worked on both Akira and the Batman properties produced by Warner Bros was Hiroyuki Aoyama, an animator who also worked on animating the orbital laser weapon in the latter half of Akira. The laser is a symbol of military might and a potent post-war image for Japan, and in the film, it's used to strike against Japan itself as the military seeks to control Tetsuo's psychic powers. The gauntlet of destructive force that follows is one of Akira's most harrowing scenes, full of flesh melting off bone, concrete erupting from the earth, and the film's heroes fleeing for their lives.So obviously the Warner Bros. team took inspiration from that as it was developing the 2000 movie Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. The show Batman Beyond had already taken cues from Akira, as it was set in a borderline-dystopian Gotham of the future, complete with its own young biker gangs, sweeping lit-up cityscapes, and a younger and rougher kid named Terry McGinnis as Batman. The creative team of director Curt Geda and producers Timm, Burnett, Paul Dini, and Glen Murakami took that influence a step beyond for the show's movie, just as they had with Phantasm. In Return of the Joker, Batman's arch-nemesis comes back after years presumed dead. In his climactic joke, he hijacks a giant military space laser to threaten the planet.In fact, the Warner Bros. team actually got Aoyama — who had also served as an animator the B:TAS episode "Feat of Clay" — to lead the animation of the orbital laser weapon sequence in Return of the Joker. "He found this to be a challenge, 15 years later, to see if he could top what he had done in Akira," Timm explained on Return of the Joker's commentary track. "It's not for me to say whether he did or not, but he sure did a great job of destroying this city." His efforts paid off. The resulting final sequence is a masterwork of detail, depth, and motion, filled in with minor touches of artistry that the producer admitted on the commentary that his team didn't even specify in notes to Aoyama.The effect of contracting the labor of artists like Aoyama and others at TMS goes beyond homage or just making this targeted obliteration look good on film (though it undoubtedly does). It subtly centralizes and reifies Akira's themes again for American audiences. There is power in advancing the idea that a military can raze a city of civilians with death from above, and that their control over such a power could be undermined by desperate individuals or bad actors, which happens in both films. There is power in advancing the idea that systemic inequality in a patriarchal society can lead to violence committed by and in inflicted on young boys and perpetuated by ever-more-violent men — potentially destroying their lives or eroding their sense of self. There is power in acknowledging that original art was created by artists animating from a specific perspective shaded by the effect of Western imperialism. And there is power in allowing them to translate their art into a new form. All this is true whether Timm or his collaborators thought about it or not when they contracted Aoyama or his collaborators from TMS, Spectrum, or other animation houses.And one response to this is to disregard it entirely, right? To say, Screw it, it's just Batman and the action looks cool and he kicks ass. Or worse, to say, Screw it, it's just a cartoon and it doesn't matter. Both those interpretations would reduce these animated works of art exactly to what Wink criticized them as: empty pop culture with no moral center, made by cynics as an opiate for literal babies.