Steamboy

Rating PG-13 Genre animated Starring Anna Paquin, Alfred Molina, Patrick Stewart Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo Publisher Sony Pictures External Links Official Site Sony Pictures

I felt it snap just below the base of my skull sending a hot pain up the right back side of my head causing my eye to tear and my hand to involuntarily massage the back of my neck. Located at the base of the brain the hype muscle has only been recently documented by the medical community and that only because of the intense workout the muscle has gotten in recent years as companies work overtime marketing their "media products" to consumers. As near as anyone can tell the hype muscle lies dormant until it comes into contact with corporate hype. But should the hype fail to live up to the tension it has generated in the muscle painful spasms can result. In the case of Steamboy I'm lucky I wasn't hospitalized.

Any film toting itself as "the new film from the creator of Akira" is positioning itself. If I sound na¯ve in my bitterness then let's review the year anime has given us stateside thus far. Sky Blue, Appleseed, and Ghost in the Shell 2 all promised ground breaking, breathtaking myth-scapes to explore. Despite some disappointment in a recent article I even defended the relative narrative immaturity of the anime form as offering the same sort of resonance provided by the fantasy's of Ray Harryhausen which create their own mythic landscapes whenever their stop motion animated monsters strut onscreen. But I also noted that Akira had been, within my admittedly limited experience, the best of the anime films that had received wide theatrical distribution in the United States. So when a film offers as it's main credential the reputation of Akira's creator I have the right to some expectations.

And so should anime fans who certainly shouldn't settle to be pandered to by the lukewarm mess that is Steamboy. On the surface it sounds promising. A young boy Rei comes into possession of his grandfather and fathers marvelously powerful steam technology in the form of a "steam ball" just before the World Expo. Even as he is on the run from his fathers powerful Ohara Foundation, who want to use the steam ball for their war profiteering the men he runs to turn out to be little better, desiring to use the device to power weapons in their drive for world domination. Can Rei and his grandfather save Rei's father and the marvelous new invention? Or must it be destroyed to keep the world safe from itself?

Originally a number of us critics groused that we were only being screened the 106 minute subtitled version. It wasn't the subtitles, but the fact that the Japanese version was some fifteen minutes longer and was being made available to the general public. But the problem with the Steamboy I saw isn't the missing 15 minutes. For a movie depending so heavily on Vernian charms Steamboy shows a striking lack of originality. The few truly eye popping visuals are surrounded by ad nauseum pronouncements about the abuse of science and how it should be used for the good of mankind. How about the arts? In particular the art of storytelling.

We get cutting edge looks at gears grinding and things exploding, but little of the wonder that has made Akira a true anime classic. The story gains a little thematically by being set in this time period but it seems apparent that Otomo seeks to inspire not with taking advantage of the way his anachronistic tech works in it's setting but with cutting edge animation techniques, and that's exactly how the movie plays out, as a tired exercise in technique despite a truly great opening sequence and chase. By the time the film takes to the skies, offering up Rei as a sort of Rocketeer Jr., there's the sense that the mechanistic and the mystic should have meshed perfectly making Steamboy a modern day Vernian epic instead of another empty spectacle. Eight years in the making, Steamboy is the most expensive animated Japanese film ever and contains about 400 3D Cuts and 180,000 individual drawings. How can anything with this many moving parts fail to move me at all?