In the 2022 Jordan Peele film, Nope, the character Emerald is escaping aliens on a motorcycle and gets tangled up in bright yellow police tape. A few frames indicate an abrupt turn and then a particular homage happens. A slide. The slide. A motorcycle stop manoeuvre from anime’s most seminal work. It’s iconic, yes, but 35 years after our header image first hit screens, why has it endured?
For the uninitiated, “the slide” is a roughly one-second, high-recognisable clip from the 1988 masterwork, Akira, where our hero Kaneda makes an abrupt stop by power-sliding his motorcycle. Its momentum is directed away from the viewer, with K using his left foot to aid in braking.