20 July, 2025 | keystroke, Alina
Akudama Drive (2020) is a “heist” anime that really gets the punk in cyberpunk. On top of its stunning visuals, it is a high-stakes action-packed story with a tight focus on its characters and the system they live in.
The characters are diverse in their motivations, personalities and crimes, with the only thing uniting them being how fucked up they all are and that they all were conscripted under threat of death to perform an impossible heist. Throughout the story we see what drives them, as well as what separates the monsters on both sides of the law from people trying to do the right thing.
This focus on separating morality from legality and the injustice of policing is what makes this show feel truly cyberpunk over merely having a neon-soaked aesthetic. The Executioners are a special task force of police with the jurisdiction to execute Akudama (criminals) with limited oversight. They are state-sanctioned violence taken to the extreme and as the show progresses it gets harder and harder to differentiate them from the Akudama.
Just because the show’s cyberpunk themes go far beyond the visual, doesn’t mean that the art style isn’t striking. The visual designs of the Akudama are unique and chaotic, while the Executioners are all dressed in crisp, white uniforms lacking individuality, reflecting their role as the arm of the state.
The tension between chaos and order in the art design is reflected in the wider world, with the state infrastructure being clean, tidy and artificial while the criminal underworld is bathed in a mess of neon blood splatters. The rest of the city is caught in-between; a cyberpunk urban sprawl with as many neon lights as it has shadows.
How the story is paced is also unique. It starts out with a status quo that is quickly settled into over the course of five or so episodes before breaking it in a way that takes the show to new heights. It gets away with this multiple times and every time brings with it a new perspective that pulls you so much deeper.
The characters are what make this show truly great, each one with depth and purpose, but our two favourites exemplify this above all else:
The Courier is initially introduced as the only character purely motivated by money and only has love to show for his bike. However this transactional persona slowly falls away over the course of the show as he is revealed to be the only other character motivated by kindness, eventually giving up everything not for a cause but for people he believes in.
He’s also a feminist, which is why it wouldn’t be very feminist of him to take first place from a woman.
The Swindler is the heart and soul of the show. Her arc is the loss of innocence. Nominally our PoV character, she gets caught up in the scheme by accident and invents the persona of The Swindler to keep herself safe. However by crafting the fake persona of a brilliant liar, the longer she keeps up the facade the more she sinks into the role in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Cutting her hair during the third act symbolises leaving her innocence behind (and makes her look like a hot butch), having now killed two men to protect Sister and realised how corrupt the system is after trying to return to society and finding herself unable to—having been branded an Akudama. When she finally embraces her role by planning out her first big deception not borne from panic or accident, she incites rebellion; finally earning her title card in her last moments.
As the rebellion takes hold in the streets the first bullet is fired by a child, parents murdered by the system that said it would protect them.
Overall the show is a masterclass in subverting and surpassing expectations, and highly recommended even if you read past the spoilers as it is sure to remain an experience no matter how much knowledge you have. Also the implied trans villain is a bold move. Just an insane show.
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