Anime steam
Steamboy
dir. Katsuhiro Otomo.
Steamboy is Otomo’s first feature-length anime since the success of his 1988 sci-fi cult classic Akira. The global anime community has waited a long time for this successor, and now delivered, it has inspired bitter division and pulled limited critical and box-office success.
Steamboy is set in a visually magnificent Victorian England, where an alternate Industrial Revolution is taking place. Ray Steam, the young hero inventor, lives in working-class Manchester. Ray, who is also the son and grandson of famous steam engineers, receives a mysterious package from his grandfather: the ‘steam ball’. In true anime tradition, it is an object of power—the catalyst by which the adventure begins and ends. Much of the film’s meat is derived from the arcane speculative fiction genre, steampunk—think cyberpunk—but instead of neuro-interfaces and cybernetic implants, there are massive cast-iron steamships, elegant behemoths of trains, mind-bendingly intricate labyrinths of shiny brass cogs and gears, all fitted with elaborate pressure valves that scream ‘She canna take nae more ... She’s gonna blow Cap’n!’ Otomo’s very Japanese take on the subtleties of Victorian society is intriguing: we see old things through a new filter.
Otomo is obviously fascinated by vast landscapes of urban dystopia: he wrote the screenplay for the troubled 2002 anime of the late Osamu, Tezuka’s manga version of Metropolis. The very name Steamboy is a direct reference to Astroboy, the iconic television series created by Tezuka, widely regarded as the godfather of Japanese animation.
Steamboy feeds the eye a wealth of complex imagery in this retro-tech world. Otomo is a passionate artisan, who has devoted the last ten years to developing Steamboy without the use of the modern Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) technologies found in such films as Toy Story and Pixar’s up coming blockbuster The Incredibles. The difference in texture is extreme: each frame of Steamboy breathes style and craft.
Unfortunately the story doesn’t match the visuals for brilliance. A ruthless corporation with its psychopathic henchmen battles the forces of Her Majesty (a stately Victoria) for control of the steam ball, an apparently endless energy source. The thematic focus of man versus machine plays out with a fair degree of complexity: the ideological struggle between the holistic and the mechanical. But what could have been poignant, will leave many cold.
If you can ignore the trite conversations and stilted interactions, Steamboy might get into gear for you. There’s fun to