Two Wheels on Screen #4: Pull the Reins and It Stops — The Metaphor Kawasaki Wrote Into a Patent

I still remember the first time I saw that scene: the opening of AKIRA (1988, Katsuhiro Otomo), and the few seconds in which Kaneda's red bike slides sideways trailing a ribbon of light. At the time I had never so much as ridden a moped. I loved motorcycles before I ever knew them. And what strikes me on every rewatch is that the red bike is never once drawn as a machine. Kaneda is not mastering it. He is wrestling it down, half a moment from being thrown off. Go back further and the same is true of the boys' manga I pulled off my father's bookshelf one night in my second year of high school and read straight through until morning. In the motorcycle manga of that era, the hero and the machine were always grappling with each other — drawn as a partner the rider could never fully command, one that obeyed about half of what it was told. On screen and on the page alike, the motorcycle was an animal for a very long time.

In August 2026 that metaphor turned into an actual document: a published patent for Kawasaki's four-legged robot, Corleo. Many readers will remember its unveiling in April 2025 at the Kawasaki pavilion of Expo 2025 in Osaka. Each leg ends in a non-slip rubber hoof split left to right so it can conform to grass, gravel or rock, and swing arms in the legs absorb the impacts. A 150cc hydrogen engine generates the electricity that drives the leg-mounted motors. The rider gives instructions by shifting weight, read by sensors built into the handlebars and the stirrups. Let me be clear: the fine detail of new machinery is not my field. I am not qualified to judge whether any of this is sound engineering. How you carry hydrogen safely, how much load four legs can take — I leave that to specialists. What I can read is only what this vehicle was built to resemble.

And yet, reading the American outlet RideApart's report on the patent drawings, what caught me was not the numbers. The patent reportedly describes the rider wearing dedicated clothing fitted with IMUs — inertial measurement units. Which way the torso is leaning, how the centre of gravity has moved: the garment reads it. And there is more. Release the grips, or pull back on them, and the machine automatically slows and stops. Those are reins. The etiquette of reins has been written into a technical document as a control specification. There is even said to be a "wasteland mode" for rough ground. Meanwhile the patent gives no top speed, no range, no limits in bad weather. From here this is my reading rather than reporting, but I think this is a blueprint that settled how you ride it before it settled what it can do. I know of no other vehicle designed in that order.

Cinema has been doing this for nearly a century. Marlon Brando riding into town in his leather jacket in The Wild One (1953) has been argued over and over as a Western with the horse swapped for a motorcycle, and the two choppers of Easy Rider (1969) have been read as cowboys who traded up to an iron horse. But it was always a metaphor. Straddling the thing, gripping it between your legs, making it obey — film borrowed that sensation from the horse and pasted it onto the motorcycle. That borrowing is exactly why it worked. An audience that had never ridden a horse could still see at a glance that the shot was about breaking something in. Put a motorcycle in open country and you have a Western; ride it into town in formation and you have the outlaws' return. Directors have been recycling that shorthand for a century. Kawasaki says it will complete a riding simulator in 2027, carry visitors at Expo 2030 in Riyadh, and put the machine on sale in 2035. The borrowed metaphor, it seems, is about to be returned. What interests me is what comes after that. A motorcycle could stay an animal on screen because the rider never quite had total control. Will we call a machine that always stops when you pull the reins an animal? Or a very well-behaved machine? I do not have the answer yet. Nobody will sit on one before 2030 at the earliest, and nobody can buy one until 2035, so the verdict can be deferred for the better part of a decade. But cinema will not wait for a verdict. When the vehicle changes, so does the way it is shot. Once a machine that climbs rock faces on four legs is ordinary, what will directors film as a story about breaking something in? For now, I still believe in those few seconds of Kaneda holding on, half-thrown, refusing to let go.