Steamboy (2004)

Good start, but then it gets ruined

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

I like this film, but do have one gripe with it; the English voice cast. But, before I get into that, let me address what I do like about the movie."Steamboy" is an inventive take on the steam-punk genre popularized in paper and pencil role playing games, where the Victorian era (typically England) sparks not just an industrial revolution, but a technological revolution where steam driven things are all around. Steam powered cars, steam powered airships, steam powered sea going vessels of all sorts, steam powered robots, steam powered weapons, and assortment of other inventions, all existing alongside a more traditional horse drawn society with buggies, whips, men and women dressing and behaving with that Victorian reserve.Europe is heavily divided by deep cultural and political rifts. Everyone who is mobile gets along well enough, and the working class folks seem to be okay with visitors from afar, but the upper-mid tier autocrats are always in search of more resources. One man believes that an innovation in harnessing steam can revolutionize the world in more ways than one, and embarks on a quest to make destructive devices available to all who are willing to pay, all the while gaining more rewards from his endeavors. His father sums up his character quite nicely at the end of the second act.James Ray Steam is the son of this one man who has dreams and ambitions that could bring mankind to ruin. And he follows a strange cloak and dagger like quest to help protect an innovation created by his grandfather. In the meantime he finds himself befriended by a an upper class girl with perhaps brutal flaws in her character, but who comes around at the end when all hell breaks loose.If I had one real critique about this film, it's that the English voice cast was not up to snuff. Technically it's a better dubbing effort than a lot of anime imported from Japan, but the actual cast was, in essence, miscast. Casting Anna Paquin to voice the young male lead almost works, but I think the team that imported the film from overseas would have better served this movie had they just gone ahead and found some twelve or fourteen year old boy to voice the part, because the adult feminine quality of Anna's voice does leak through here and there.Patrick Stewart is a solid performer, though his voice feels a little stilted, which I'm sure is due to the dubbing constraints of fitting English dialog into a character designed to mouth Japanese sentences. Likewise Scarlett Ohara's rendition of the little girl seems to suffer some of the same constraints--that, and she doesn't sound like a snobbish girl from upper class British gentry; i.e. she needed an accent.The scope of the story is typical Japanese in spite of it being set in Great Britain, where colossal machines and armies of soldiers clash with titanic results. I always feel a bit exhausted after seeing one of these Japanese epic productions that have lots of action and lots of large scale destruction. But I guess that's a good thing, because the Japanese know how to bring you back from all of that emotional height, and deliver good stories.So it is with Steamboy. It's not a children's film as such, though I think preteen boys (maybe some girls) up through the 20-something dem will enjoy it. Me, as a middle aged man, liked the production, but then again I'm that much of an anime fan to like a lot of Japanese offerings.It's huge in scope, has quite a bit of action, it is a bit dark here and there thematically as well as visually, and could stand to be recast for another English rendition, but otherwise this is a solid performer. Check it out by yourself, of if you have some older kids who don't mind seeing the odd cartoon every now then, watch it with them.Enjoy.

This full-length feature took director Katsuhiro Otomo ten years and over $20 million to make. It was repeatedly delayed because Otomo kept on wanting to perfect it. Still, the story lacks originality, replaying the central conspiracy of Akira (1988) in historical dress. A huge amount of money and skill was thrown at the screen so Steamboy is gorgeously animated. It's one of the best steampunk anime, but it's flawed. It's overlong and more attention should have been paid to improve the often clichéd script. Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that a pub in the background of a street in Manchester is called the Rover's Return - a reference to Coronation Street, a long-running British soap opera "up north", and proof of how thoroughly the artists working on this film did their research.

Click here for the podcast: http://bit.ly/at2vLS Is the Steamboy the much awaited follow up to Akira a worthy predecessor? One of the most expensive anime's made in it's time, but does it deliver the goods? Where was the money spent and was it well spent? How does it compare with Akira and what are the other similarities? Listen to the discussion of a movie team built up of European Film Snob, a popcorn muncher and a omnivore. In the weekly podcast of small ticket entertainment. The Upodcast reviews this anime classic in their weekly show in detail with a spoilerific in depth revisit. the team also wonders why Two and a Half men is still on TV, we speak about shape shifting sports cars and the drug fueled orgies of a Rabbi.

It's been a long time since I last watched Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, and so many years later that I finally picked up Steamboy, his follow up production which took years from conception to fruition. Set in 19th Century, alternate history of Victorian England, Steamboy boasts some fantastic looking action visuals, but got bogged down by a very clunky narrative that deals with three generations of steampunks with the erm, Steam family.Grandad Llyod and dad Eddie Steam collaborated in the building of what would be the next technological marvel at the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, but a difference in philosophy led to catastrophe, that will put their grandchild/child Ray in harm's way when their "steamball", a device with infinitesimal steam power, gets sent in a package to their family home, plunging the tech-mechanical whizz into an adventure that's way beyond his diminutive age, in a crossroads between the O'Hara Foundation, and the might of the British Empire, both wanting his family's device to achieve their own ends.For an anime film, the story's rich with themes such as the abuse of technology, and man's propensity to weaponize almost everything in order to gain an upper hand on our enemies, but just who this enemy is, be it real or imagined, is something explored in depth in the film. From Ray's perspective of a peace-loving nature, it's also quite true that we're usually swayed by beautiful ideals and wonderfully inspiring phrases, often used to mask true intentions, that we find our loyalties flip-flopping from one to another, until of course a ground must be found upon which to stand upon, and it is this growth that we witness in the protagonist. Worst still of course is that these differences in philosophies stem from the same family tree, making it a lot harder for rational decisions to be made.But the story did feel bloated especially in the third act, where it seemed to drag on perpetually without an end in sight, which of course gave opportunities for the animators to showcase their intricate designs, from little trinkets to large moving gears, and plenty of out of this world concepts of early gliders, one man submarines, and the one that takes the cake will be Steam Tower, like a Transformers fortress such as Metroplex. Watching this film is like witnessing how the animators can take a simple Lego brick, here made up of valves, pipes and steam, and put them all together to become weapons of mass destruction, all steam powered. Even Steamboy's own creation later on, as seen in trailers and movie stills, seem like a hark back to The Rocketeer.With characters created that you'll clearly love or hate - Scarlett comes to mind for being extremely pompous, whiny and absolutely clueless as the heiress of the O'Hara Foundation, Steamboy did have its moments that will thrill during its action sequences, but everything outside of that seemed one really round robin way to get from start to end. Enjoyable nonetheless, as it kept its best moments during the end credit roll, with a poignant and fitting end in its epilogue of an alternate history.