The art of Mauro Mason

Mauro Mason is a visual artist from Italy, specialized in illustration and motion design. His work focuses on concepts and ideas, direction for animation, art direction, storyboards, illustrations and original assets, usually for agencies and production studios.

Besides this regular artwok, he has run for a while the side project DEPOT977 about digital illustration, sci-fi, tributes and fanart. And as a true Akira fan, Mauro is creating here some personal projects around our beloved anime.

Mauro Mason Akira RC Car Poster

The first one is his particular version of the Kaneda’s bike in the shape of a RC Car. Starting from a WLtoys K969 RC Drift Car, Mauro adapted a static model kit of a Toyota Supra sport car by Tamiya. Then, designed a decal paper with the original bike stickers and painted in the red iconic color. The result is one of the most stunning tributes to Akira that we know of. You can find highlights of the project in the @depot977 Instagram account to see the process and some videos.


A few years before that, Mauro had an idea for the 30th anniversary of Akira movie. Finally, he created an illustration in his own artistic style as a personal tribute to Akira. The prints are available on Redbubble.

Mauro Mason Akira tribute poster

But this time, Mauro didn’t make only a drawing: the artwork also comes as an animated version, a kinetic poster with music from Tsujira Even more, this moving creation has its AR edition. To enjoy it, we have to use Aria Platform, an augmented reality free app to watch this and more cool stuff.


To discover more artists who have paid their own tribute to Akira, visit our section The art of Akira. And of course, if you want to be featured in our website or know about any great artists who have paid tribute to Akira, please contact us.

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