You know that thing I was praising earlier on in this review? How characters would always be moving, including the background characters? How detailed the background art was? The movie also seemed to realise how great it was at this and leant on it too much.
So why am I not feeling all that hyped about Metropolis? This might be a bit harder to explain. With Metropolis, there’s clearly an artistic vision here and a story with proper depth. With Steamboy, all the pretty visuals in the world couldn’t hide that the story was a total damp squib with dumb idealism and pathetic characters mwahaha go my biased views go. In other words, this movie is not like the other 2000-era movie with Katsuhiro Otomo on board, Steamboy. There’s some pretty obvious allusions to the Tower of Babel too and the danger of trying to become like a god. Tie this is with government corruption and how the desires of those in power, as heartfelt and real those feelings might be, can lead to the destruction of their city.
It’s particularly striking how the rebellion starts with the second class citizens throwing their little fight, but the real rebellion is right at the end when the robots all rise up under their ‘charismatic’ leader. It’s about class warfare and how the lowest levels of society will rise up eventually. The movie clearly has an actual point to the story too. It’s very blues orientated, which ties into the seedy underworld feel the lower levels of this heavily class-based world have. It seems weird to highlight something like this, but when you spend all your time watching the usual cost-cutting techniques of anime produced for television, it really stands out here. Even background characters are doing little things like picking up bottles and throwing coins and puffing cigars. Incredible detail has gone into each background drawing and there is rarely a shot where characters aren’t moving. I feel a bit awkward not liking Metropolis, because there’s a hell of a lot of things to like about it. on it, such as Rintaro the director, one of my all time favourite anime folks Katsuhiro Otomo doing the scripts, and the production being done at Madhouse. Metropolis is…an anime movie from 2001 that’s loosely based on Tezuka’s manga, but also tries to bring in some plot elements from the original movie. He’d only seen a single picture in a magazine and thought it looked pretty rad. Its similarities to the original film are pretty limited, mainly because Tezuka hadn’t even seen the film when he wrote the manga. Metropolis is…a manga written in 1949 by Osamu Tezuka. It’s set in a dystopian future where some naive teenager tries to overcome the class system to pursue love. Metropolis is…a silent film from 1927 by the German director Fritz Lang.
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