Archive.org - Akira 1988

However, the counter-argument, embodied by the Archive’s existence, is potent. Commercial availability is not synonymous with cultural preservation. Streaming masters are altered. Physical releases go out of print. Digital storefronts revoke licenses. The only entity with no incentive to let Akira vanish into the entropy of decaying bits and changing formats is the non-commercial, user-driven archive. In a very real sense, archive.org holds a version of Akira that is more permanent, more accessible to a global scholar, and more historically transparent (with user comments detailing source provenance) than the version on any corporate server.

These scans are crucial because:

This is the critical question. is still under copyright. It is owned by Kodansha and licensed by Funimation (now Crunchyroll) in North America. akira 1988 archive.org

Akira is set in a post-apocalyptic Neo-Tokyo in the year 2019, 31 years after a devastating event known as the "Great Tokyo Earthquake" that destroyed the city. The story follows Shotaro Kaneda, the leader of a biker gang called the Capsules, and his friend Tetsuo Shima, who possesses telekinetic powers. When Tetsuo's abilities are discovered by a government organization, he is taken into their custody and subjected to experiments. However, Tetsuo soon escapes and begins to wreak havoc on Neo-Tokyo, leading Kaneda and his allies to try and stop him. Physical releases go out of print