From Neo-Tokyo to new path: Postmodern cyberpunk, surveillance, and the fragmented subject in Akira and a scanner darkly

This paper explores the cyberpunk movie texts Akira (Otomo, 1988) and A Scanner Darkly (Linklater (2006); based on Dick (1991) novel) as cultural critiques that use postmodern aesthetics to examine identity disintegration under the weight of surveillance, technology, and political control. Drawing on scholarly sources—and to inversely examine their social capital—this paper analyzes the films’ formal techniques, cultural contexts, and narrative structures mirroring each other, and arriving in 20-year increments. To argue that both works contribute to a new transnational discourse in fragmentation, subjectivity, and the dissolution of human agency in the face of a chronologically bound state and technological power apparatus would only be an understatement. As such, we must illicit contemporary cloud-based identity fragmentation, consciousness, and virtualized governance trends in 2025 as a means of producing, such as these films have done in their abbreviated 20-year gap, not just narratives of control, but new aesthetic interfaces of political critique. Notably, Ne Zha 2, a Chinese animated film released in 2025, has become the highest-grossing animated film of all time, surpassing Inside Out 2.