Akira
The story of a film made for seven hundred million yen and of a legend made from a press release. The three figures everyone repeats — the budget, the cels and the most-expensive-anime record — all come from the same 1988 publicity apparatus. Here they are corrected one by one, with sources. Thirty pages in PDF and EPUB, free and with no sign-up, in English and Spanish.
No form, no email and no data harvesting. The PDF is around 3.8 MB. The EPUB comes inside a zip because the server rejects the bare format: unzip it and it opens in any reader.
What's inside issue 02
Ten episodes and done, said the editor
Kodansha was launching a magazine and came looking for Otomo. The first meeting produced a short commission. It ran to a hundred and twenty chapters across eight years.
The number that came out of a press kit
For thirty-two years everyone repeated 1.1 billion yen. Kodansha's own production manager had said seven hundred million, in print.
Eight companies to pay for one film
Where a producer should be, there is a list. That list is the system that has financed anime ever since, here almost in its original form.
Animating on twos, which costs triple
The technical decision that explains what the film looks like fits in two Japanese words. It also explains why the schedule collapsed.
An agriculture doctor writes the music
Tsutomu Ōhashi took his doctorate with a thesis on ergot alkaloids. His scientific career explains how Akira sounds and how it was remixed in 2020.
One hundred and forty-seven days
The stadium hoarding, the subtraction the whole of Japan did on 28 February 2020, and the WHO prophecy hoax, debunked at the time.
Series calendar
Precinct 2099 · 17 November 2026
One night, one case, three endings. A detective visual novel on Steam, €7.99 and four languages. Adding it to your wishlist before launch is what helps a studio this size most.
Previous issues
Ghost in the Shell
A manga a high school teacher drew at night, a film made for around three million dollars and a folk-song choir. English PDF · EPUB · PDF en castellano
Forty years of cyberpunk
The eight novels that founded the genre, six authors, fifteen dates and five video games. Twenty pages in PDF. Download the special
The visual novel, the genre of stories
Eleven games from Europe, North America, Japan and Korea, each with its data sheet and context. EPUB and PDF, free and no sign-up. Download issue 01