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Akira is a 1988 Japanese animated film co-written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo based on his manga of the same name. The movie led the way for the growing popularity of anime in the West, with Akira considered a forerunner of the second wave of anime fandom that began in the early 1990s. One of the reasons for the movie's success was the highly advanced quality of its animation. At the time, most anime was notorious for cutting production corners with limited motion, such as having only the characters' mouths move while their faces remained static. Akira broke from this trend with meticulously detailed scenes, exactingly lip-synched dialogue a first for an anime production (voices were recorded before the animation was completed, rather than the opposite) and super-fluid motion as realized in the film's more than 160,000 animation cels