Character · Akira
Shotaro Kaneda
Neo-Tokyo's most famous vehicle is a red motorbike, and the boy riding it is barely qualified to own it.
In Otakana the clue reads: Leader of the gang with the red motorbike
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Akira
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Shotaro Kaneda leads a small gang of teenagers who race stolen bikes down the highways of Neo-Tokyo at night. He is loud, vain and not especially thoughtful. The bike does a lot of the work on his behalf: a red machine with a long wheelbase and a laid-back riding position that Katsuhiro Otomo drew often enough to make it as recognisable as any face in the film.
The story turns when his friend Tetsuo crashes and the army takes him away. Everything Kaneda does afterwards is an attempt to get him back, which is complicated by Tetsuo becoming something the army cannot hold either. Kaneda has no powers of his own. He has a laser rifle he barely understands, a stolen bike and a stubbornness that keeps putting him in rooms where he does not belong.
Otomo began the manga in Young Magazine in 1982 and directed the 1988 film himself, on a budget large enough to record the dialogue first and animate the mouths to match, which almost nobody in Japan could afford to do. The film reached Western video shelves and taught a generation that animation could be aimed at adults. Kaneda's bike slide is one of the most copied shots in the medium.
Spelling KANEDA
KANEDA is the family name, and the game wants it rather than Shotaro, whose long vowel some romanisations write as Shotarou. The answer avoids that argument entirely. Six letters in strict consonant-vowel alternation, ka-ne-da, from the kanji for gold and field. No silent letters, no doubled consonants, nothing hiding in the middle.