Review of Akira

You must remember, this movie was made in 1988. If you're going to critique it accurately, you must take this into account. This anime 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 detailedscenes, 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. Notable motifs in the film include youth culture, delinquency, psychic awareness, social unrest and future uncertainty weighed against the historical spectre of nuclear destruction and Japan's post-war economic revival.

In a nutshell:
1988
revolutionary
made it possible for you and I to watch anime

Not only for its time, but even still today, its suspense, paranormal structure, and plot are highly regarded.

In all fairness, it really does deserve a 10