Nearly twenty years on from the groundbreaking Akira, was director Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s first feature length anmie since really worth the wait?…
James Steam isn’t your typical lad. Set against the industrial fervor of the Victorian era, James is a dab hand with machinery at cotton mills in his home of Manchester, and a would-be inventor in his own time, taking after both his father and grandfather.
When his grandfather returns with the mysterious ’steamball’ - a highly compressed ball of steam of limitless power - and the news that his father has died, his ex-employers the O’Hara Foundation aren’t far behind. Wanting it back by any means, and destroying James’ family home into the bargain.
Soon James finds himself on the run to London with his hero, Robert Louis Stevenson, but is kidnapped by the Foundation. Soon he discovers his father is alive, but has joined the foundation to continue his work, the Steam Tower, under the young heiress to the O’Hara fortune Scarlett.
The Tower looks set outshine the Great Exhibition, but what secrets lie within its walls, and what are the Foundations motives?
It’s been nearly twenty years since manga writer and artist Katsuhiro Ôtomo adapted his own ambitious Akira graphic novel and turned it into an even more elaborate epic. One of the first Anime films to get any sort of release in the West, Akira almost single-handedly changed the way animation was viewed - taking it beyond being ‘just for kids’ and creating a real market for Japanese animation in the bargain.
Despite being involved in projects since - such as Metropolis, which Ôtomo worked on the story updating Osamu Tezuka 40s comic book with more pointed references to themes of humanity lost in the machine - it always felt as if Akira was his life’s work, as if he came close to exhausting himself completing it.
So Steamboy is a welcome return to the director’s for one of the heroes of anime and manga, but was it worth the wait? Well, sadly yes and no.
Famously the most expensive anime film ever, at nearly $20 million, the production was even shelved for several years in the mid 90s due to financial problems. The ongoing battle to bring the film to the screen, together with spending 8 years in production in total, brought an epic to the screen in look as well as length.
Ôtomo has faithfully and beautifully brought a vision of Victorian Manchester and London, albeit taking rather too many liberties with historical fact. The Great Exhibition happened 15 years before the film takes place, Tower Bridge and the Manchester town hall were completed long after, Robert Stevenson was already dead, and so on. Yet the accuracy of the mill looms and steam trains are quite incredible, it seems it’s the machinery itself that interests him most. In the same way that Metropolis was a view of the future as it might have been imagined in the 20s and 30s, Steamboy visualizes technology as it might have been in Victorian times. All steam and engines, it’s wonderfully rendered as more organic than digital. (You get the impression Ôtomo bashed out the initial premise for Metropolis whilst waiting to get funding for Steamboy.)
The use of new technology leads a CGI led picture that, gladly, looks like organic cell animation of days past. The detail is incredible without the cold, analytical feel so common in CGI animation, allowing camera angles to seamlessly sweep views following characters.
It’s a ripping yarn that captures the spirit of tales like those of Jules Verne or Conan Doyle, yet with a twist that immediately makes the content more relevant to modern audiences, like fellow graphic novel author Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. For Ôtomo there’s rather more of a ‘Manga-fication’ to the story, and suddenly there are far more recognisable elements such as the heavy, albeit steam, machinery, a behemoth structure/robot/dinosaur causing destruction in a big thriving city. Most noticeably it’s the central theme of man dwarfed by a technology he cannot control draws heavily on the post-atomic age themes that have so influenced Japanese cinema, such as Ôtomo’s Akira, for over a century.
Though mirrored in the breakdown of the relationship between grandfather, father and son, the atomic age monstrosity overpowers character development, meaning we never truly care for the outcome. Instead we are exposed to a long-winded finale that could easy have been tightened up (and was on the English language version with nearly twenty minutes cut).
That’s not to imply there isn’t a lot of intelligence to Ôtomo’s script, like the O’Hara Foundation’s showing off of their artillery range to world military leaders - happy to start a war with England just to prove how effective it is - yet it all seems somewhat lost if you don’t care about the characters. And there’s just not enough to the story, co-written by Sadayuki Muraito (Perfect Blue), to warrant the running time.
Oddly, despite devising an end title sequence showing us the further adventures of Steamboy, (which, frankly, look a lot more interesting than the events of the feature) Ôtomo is not interested in producing a sequel - even if he’d like all the staff he brought together to make one. Perhaps it’s taken enough of his life to bring to the screen, yet another life’s work?
This is a fine adventure movie, but sadly not the classic we might have hoped.
DVD details
Distributor: Sony Pictures Home Ent (UK)
The UK has been given a bewildering choice of DVD formats. The theatrical release, some 20 minutes shorter, includes only the English language dub, and no real extras. If you want the original language version, however, you'll have to spring for the box set, which also includes a longer version of the English dub.
This version includes a features disc with documentaries, interviews and production drawings. Better still, it also includes a 164 page booklet of Ôtomo's character and mecha sketches and storyboard sequences, collectible postcards and a comic book of Steamboy's further adventures.
All of which adds up to great package, but oddly it doesn't give you the edited shorter version, which in this case might be something of an over sight.
