When I came out of the cinema after the Akira re-release, the thing I couldn’t get out of my head was, of all things, the AI short dramas I’d been scrolling through these past few days.

The two have nothing to do with each other. But colliding like that, they gave me an absurd kind of vertigo.

Celluloid

On the big screen, Neo-Tokyo explodes. The hand-drawn detail is packed tight, even a little morbid, and what comes at you is nothing but sheer physical effort and will.

Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion… These were monsters that only Japan’s bubble economy at its most feverish, and the warmth still lingering after it burst, could afford to raise. Hundreds, even thousands of people hunched over celluloid sheets day and night, grinding away, just to chisel the hallucinations in their heads onto film.

Katsuhiro Otomo turned his own manga into the animated film Akira. It came out in July 1988, just as the bubble was racing toward its peak. The production committee that put up the money included Kodansha, Toho, and Bandai, and even a trading conglomerate like Sumitomo Corporation had a stake. The Ghost in the Shell film and the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series both came out in 1995, by which time the bubble had been gone for a few years.

According to Japanese sources, Akira alone took three years. About 1,300 people worked on it, drawing roughly 150,000 cels and using 327 colours. The dialogue was recorded first, and the animators drew the mouth movements to match the voice actors’ performances. The usual practice in Japanese animation at the time was the reverse: draw first, dub later.

Almost forty years on, that density still pins you to your seat.

The banquet that never ends

And on the other screen? AI short dramas pour out by the thousand every day, and streams generated in real time can even keep going for as long as the viewer doesn’t switch them off.

According to DataEye, a data company that tracks short dramas, more than 220,000 new AI dramas and animated comic dramas went live on Douyin alone in the first half of 2026, an average of over 1,200 a day. A March report in Science and Technology Daily said AI comic dramas now cost as little as 500 yuan per minute to make, and a small team of ten or so people can turn out fifty episodes in twenty days. Akira took 1,300 people three years.

The technology really is astonishing, and the cost has dropped almost to zero. But the logic coming off all of it is the same: no resistance at all, no human warmth, only an endless supply of sensory bait, cobbled together to capture neurotransmitters. In the future, when a child opens their eyes, this is probably what they’ll face: a banquet that never ends and never runs dry. You don’t order, you don’t wait, and the dishes keep coming after you’re full.

The yardstick

What really sends a chill down my spine isn’t the technology itself. It’s the shift in the “aesthetic anchor.”

When my generation watches AI junk, we’re actually carrying a yardstick inside us. We were knocked flat by genuinely good things in films, books, and old video games. Even if we didn’t know what “serious art” meant at the time, our taste buds had long since been trained to be picky. So today, when the algorithm dumps its garbage on us, you can taste the industrial saccharine in a second.

But what about the next generation? The baseline of their palate may well be built on industrial saccharine from the start.

A shifted anchor means the yardstick has been swapped. When we measure AI short dramas against Akira, what we get is cheapness. A kid who grows up using AI short dramas as their yardstick will measure Akira and probably get slow, old, and hard to follow. Both will be sure they measured right.

No one taught us this yardstick. It built up over all the times we stumbled onto something.

Encounters in the wild

As a kid, when you stumbled on a masterpiece on TV or on a disc, you weren’t after anything. You didn’t know what awards it had won or where it ranked in film history. You were just passing by, and it hit you. This kind of “encounter in the wild” has a magic to it. Without a sound, it becomes part of the base layer of who you are.

The reason you could stumble on things is that back then you didn’t get to choose. You watched whatever the station put on, and if you didn’t want to, the most you could do was change the channel. With discs, too, you watched whatever was lying around. There were plenty of things you’d never have picked yourself, like an old film you couldn’t really follow from beginning to end, but it happened to be on, so you kept watching. Some you forgot as soon as they were over. Some stayed with you for years. That’s the good thing about stumbling on something: it has nothing to do with the taste you already had. It breaks in from outside.

The algorithm works the other way around. Its whole skill is making sure you never come across anything that isn’t to your taste. Linger a few extra seconds on something and it gives you more of it; swipe past something and it shows you less. It won’t stop you from going to look for Akira. It just makes sure you never stumble on it. Even if Akira does show up in your feed, it will most likely be one of those “Akira in a few minutes” recap videos: the plot gets explained, and the two hours get saved.

But if you miss that window, the good stuff turns into “classics that need to be excavated.”

Watching them as an adult is a make-up class. You can still understand them that way, you may even pick up more of the craft, but what you catch up on rarely makes it into that base layer. What you stumbled on in your teens and what you worked through later, one film at a time off a list, don’t carry the same weight.

Akira won’t disappear, of course. It will lie safe and sound in film archives and on film buffs’ watchlists. But if a child is fed seamlessly by the algorithm from an early age, and gets used to a twist every three seconds and stimulation that never once lets up, what reason would they have as an adult to spend two hours sitting through the slow first twenty minutes of an old film and getting used to the way stories breathed decades ago? Finding it isn’t the problem. They simply don’t need it.

There’s actually no shortage of time. According to the China Online Audiovisual Development Research Report (2026), people spend an average of 129 minutes a day on micro-dramas, longer than Akira’s 124-minute running time. The two-plus hours a day are there to be had. They’ve just been cut into little pieces.

Nostalgia

Every generation of elders thinks the popular culture of the young is going downhill, and I know this can easily turn into clichéd nostalgia.

I should lay out that objection in full first. People have worried in the same way about novels, television, comics, and video games. Japan’s 1955 campaign to drive out “bad books” is one example. According to Japanese Wikipedia, at the campaign’s height a federation of mothers’ groups held a “rally to drive out bad books,” where members wearing aprons put some 60,000 magazines and manga to the flames. It had started with nothing more than a slogan: that May, a group of mothers in Akasaka, Tokyo, launched “Don’t look, don’t buy, don’t read.” Osamu Tezuka later recalled that some people had even called him “an enemy of children.”

Thirty-odd years later, Akira grew out of Japanese manga and animation. The thing I now use as my yardstick is the very kind of thing adults were throwing into the fire back then.

Looking back, most of these fears came to nothing, or at least things never got as bad as people said at the time. The new things people looked down on often went on to produce masterpieces of their own. Maybe the next generation will also stumble on something that’s theirs in ways I can’t imagine, maybe even in the vertical short dramas I turn my nose up at today.

But my worry isn’t a generation gap. It’s that a certain “sense of touch” is wasting away.

Even when novels, television, and comics were being attacked, they were finished works, made and then left sitting there. Once a book is printed or a film is cut, it’s fixed. It won’t change a word or a shot depending on who’s watching. It doesn’t know who you are; you have to walk over to it yourself. Behind the short dramas you scroll past today is a system that measures you in real time. It records the second you swipe away and the frame you stop on, and it adjusts the next one to match. All it wants is for you not to leave.

Drain the things that once stung us and shook us out of a person’s growing up, and what becomes of the way they see the world?

Resistance

Earlier I said AI short dramas have “no resistance at all.” The more I think about that word, the more it seems to matter.

It was resistance that pressed Akira into that density. Every cel had to be drawn by someone, stroke by stroke, then painted, sheet by sheet. A mistake meant starting over, and even the mouth movements had to chase the pre-recorded voices. Staff, money, and time were all limited, and the deadline was right there. Under those conditions, every shot that made it into the film was there because someone had decided it was worth the effort. That density is what you get when decisions like that pile up one after another. AI short dramas don’t have this layer: generating one more segment costs almost nothing, so keeping it doesn’t need a reason.

There is resistance on the viewing end too. A good work doesn’t try to please you right away. It breathes at its own pace and leaves a lot unexplained, and the best parts are often hidden in places that aren’t much fun to watch: a long stretch of silence, a scene you didn’t get the first time. You have to go along with it for a while, put up with a spell of confusion and impatience, before you find out where it’s taking you.

The “sense of touch” I’m talking about is probably honed against the resistance at both ends. Touch is, at bottom, a feeling of resistance: when you press your hand on a table, you can feel the table because the table pushes back against your hand.

AI short dramas take away the resistance at both ends. The people making them don’t have to choose, the people watching don’t have to put up with anything, there’s a twist every three seconds, and nowhere does anything push back. If someone has only ever touched things like this since childhood, the good things will all still be there, but their hand may no longer be able to feel them.

After the show

Preaching like “This is a classic, you should watch it” has never worked. We fell into those works back then because they had a savage vitality of their own. But when the cleverest algorithms in the world are all fighting over one child’s attention, shoving the most mediocre, cheapest dopamine into their eyes at the lowest possible cost, that vitality may never even get the chance to cross their path.

A re-release can’t manufacture an encounter in the wild either. Anyone who buys a ticket for a 1988 animated film probably already knows what it is. But for those two hours, at least, the resistance came back. Once the lights went down, the film moved forward at its own pace. It wasn’t going to cut to a flashier shot because somebody’s attention drifted, and there was nowhere to swipe away to.

When I came out of the cinema, the neon on the street was bright and my phone was still buzzing with notifications. It just suddenly hit me that we may be the last generation who could still stumble on those great creations “in the wild” while our taste was still taking shape.

Sources

Cited at second hand: Yoshiyuki Nagaoka, Manga wa naze kisei sareru no ka (Why is manga regulated?), Heibonsha Shinsho, 2010, pp. 97–98; Osamu Tezuka, Garasu no chikyū o sukue (Save the glass Earth), Kōbunsha, 1996, p. 14. Page references follow the Japanese Wikipedia article 悪書追放運動 listed above; the books themselves were not checked.