It's still so bizarre to me to see articles about anime and manga in staid American institutions like the New Yorker. It was not that long ago that "elite" publications like this would dismiss anime as the lowest of trash.
But I don't feel like it was a net win—even as only an infrequent pervayor of the animes, I loved the old nerd counter culture of the internet, "weebs", video game fans, and it got absolutely blown apart, decontextualized, dismantled. It's great that some mostly-shounen anime has achieved mainstream success outside of Japan, but it's such a small section of a rich medium. Even considering that most anime is pretty bad, what I love about it is how it's often eccentric and weird, pushing boundaries, stunningly shameless. The stuff I liked mostly didn't gain mainstream success at all, what really became mainstream was "shows like Dragon Ball Z." That's cool and everything, but people in that corner massively outnumber the old communities of nerd losers that I once occupied, leaving me yet again out of place.
Obviously I can either accept reality or die mad, so I try not to spend too much time dwelling on it anymore. But wow, what a monkey's paw seeing some of the things I liked going more mainstream has been. Be careful what you wish for.
I mean, it's stuff like DBZ and One Piece that has mainstream success in Japan, too. The weird stuff is/was relatively niche there too compared to the big names, it's just the total slice of the pie relative to the overall Japanese population was bigger.
But lots of the weird stuff that is questionable by mainstream Western standards has also gotten significantly larger here, too. I've been watching anime since the early 90s, and feel like I'm more or less used to it's weirdness, but Monogatari for example still has stuff that makes me uncomfortable - but it was quite popular in the west, far bigger than similarly strange stuff was when DBZ was airing.
What made Akira interesting to foreign audiences at the time wasn't exactly the thematic content - though it got critical praise - but the more adult subjects and violence. What you found in Western animation at the time was vastly weighted towards children's toy sales and Disney general-audiences content - there was nothing like the OVA boom. So Akira existed as "the anime with nukes, biker gangs and mutants", alongside Hokuto no Ken's "atomic wasteland where muscle men punch each other and their heads explode". And that was what defined imported anime throughout the 90's - if it wasn't violent, it was sexy. Or it was Ghibli. Interest in series like Evangelion took some time to catch up with that, as more of a fan culture arose and tastes became discerning.
[0] http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/freshly-remem...
Cultural poverty and ignorance are often dressed as elitism.