Steamboy

I saw the subbed Steamboy this weekend and liked it a lot!

Without any spoilers, I'll try to give you my brief opinion:

Basically, if you like movies where people are pulling levers and turning valves, and pipes are bursting and gears are flying everywhere, you'll love Steamboy. Likewise if you love shocked Englishmen, and steam punk adventures, you'll love Steamboy.

If you're expecting bloodspray and violence and beheadings, forget about it. There's a conspicuous lack of blood in this movie. There are violent situations galore, and plenty of opportunities for scalding burns or lost limbs that just don't happen. That's why reviewers (and myself) are confused as to whether or not this is a children's film. For the lack of
bloody violence, it seems like it's meant for a younger audience. It's almost as if someone is holding Otomo back. In scene after scene thick metal cables snap off and whip around and ought to sever people in two, but it just doesn't happen. I didn't really mind the lack of gore, since there were plenty of other good things happening in the film, but it does
weigh heavily as a lack.

That said, throughout, Steamboy seems like a pretty ideal film for 10-year-old boys. I like a lot of 10-year-old boy stuff, so this film really appealed to me.

If you're looking for a strong morals though, don't bother. Steamboy is a ridiculously amoral film. None of the characters are "good". At best, some of them are chaotic neutral (or lawful neutral). You get the real sense that Otomo is jealous of Miyazaki's amoral villains and has tried to do something along those lines. I can't say much more about this without spoilers, but it makes for a great discussion after the film, to say the least.

The film is also lacking a great score. Akira had a magnificent score (that I've listened to way more often than I've seen the film), but Steamboy has a weirdly generic score. It doesn't really stick out enough to be bothersome, but at the same time you feel the lack of a wonderful soundtrack. Everything else is so well done that you can feel the composer dropping the ball.

Akira had a lot of moments of confusion (for me as a viewer). Steamboy has some things about it which are a bit confusing and weird, but whereas Akira lumps most of the crazy at the end, Steamboy has laid out the crazy in a thin layer paced well over the course of the film.

In many ways, Steamboy seems weirdly like a predecessor to Akira, in both it's historical setting and also in terms of Otomo's restraint. But it is a worthy predecessor.

Steamboy has a lot of really terrific spectacle. The backgrounds are wholly magnificent. 2-D and 3-D mesh nearly seamlessly. The first 20 to 30 minutes of the film have a spectacular action sequence that made me do cliched things, like "sit on the edge of my seat" and say it "took my breath away" and all that.

I can't say that the entire film kept up the pace of the first 20 minutes, or that the ending was 100% satisfactory - indeed, it seems to run a bit long. I thought for sure it was well over two hours, even though it wasn't that long. But I was never bored... in fact, I think I'd feel gypped if the movie was any shorter.

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April 5, 2005 09:53 PM, Dunham said:

Well now that I've seen it I went back and read your review.

I agree that the characters are all pretty amoral, but that didn't bother me (same with Akira). What bothered me - and this is one of the major things that bothers me with anime in general - was that Otomo wasted a lot of time pretending to have a coherent philosophy when he clearly doesn't. I think he and Miyazaki are two fundamentally different storytellers. Miyazaki I think cares a lot about what he has to say and not so much how he says it. Otomo on the other hand seems to invest everything in how he tells his story (animation technique, general design) and not at all what he has to say (incedentally I prefer the latter of the two).

You can see this in his films like Akira and the "Cannon Fodder" segment of Memories. The films have completely unique and original visual styles, right down to the deliberate use of minimal color schemes, and the way the shots fit together (Akira = choppy. lots of discontinuities; Memories = everything flows together into a sort of collage, like the wall of posters shown in outside the canons). Other things like plot, character motivation seem somewhat arbitrary and clearly don't interest him (two glaring examples are the Colonel from Akira and the moustached crane-operator villian in Steamboy). In this most recent one he draws too much attention to the areas that are lacking by cobbling together a half-assed philosophy out of random cliches and spewing them out every five minutes (for the first two-thirds of the film). Akira had a lot less of that - the only thing that really comes to mind is that funny line about "what if an amoeba could build a motorbike" - so I was less inclined to notice the dumb elipses in the plot and more inclined to masturbate about it's general awesomeness.

For these reasons I think I enjoyed the later portions of Steamboy better; I was waiting for Ray Steam to fly that little steam ball around for half the movie and it's really awesome when he actually does it. Likewise I agree this one looks fantastic. I liked the washed-out color scheme (oh except notably on Scarlett), character design and the deliberately choppy effect on a lot of the character animation (again sort of a throwback to Akira). He also recycled some really great images, like the metalic sphere rising out of the depris (Akira's sleep chamber?) and especially that weird little moment of the "Robot Carnival."

Oh and I totally agree on the music. It just sounds like stock orchestral stuff. Too much fanfare, not enough Jegogging.

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