Metropolis (2001)
Directed by Rintaro. Animated.
The city of Metropolis is futuristic and cosmopolitan, and is basking in the pride of its latest achievement, the Ziggurat, a massive technological edifice. However, there is a dark side to this prosperity: the increasing use of robots has created an underclass of unemployed humans, discontented and volatile, and the Ziggurat is, in fact, part of industrialist Duke Red’s scheme to depose the incumbent president and install a perfect machine government. The Ziggurat’s centrepiece is Tima, a humanoid robot, built by rogue scientist Laughton.
This film is Katsuhiro Otomo’s (writer and director of Akira) adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s 1949 manga, which was inspired by Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 SF. This number of re-interpretations should warn you against expecting a straightforward remake: in fact, about the only feature common to the two films is the presence of a super-advanced female robot. In both films she is a tool intended to reinforce centralised control over the population but in the 2001 version her exposure to the realities of human and human-robot relations ultimately causes her to explode into the mother of all adolescent rage-against-injustice tantrums.
Metropolis’ themes are, in fact, the stock-in-trade of Japanese anima: maladjusted teenagers, social decay, the totalitarian tendencies of centralised power, and the abuse of technology with its catastrophic consequences, all spiced with heavy borrowings from Western cultural traditions (are Eastern traditions insufficiently apocalyptic or am I just unable to spot them?).
A lot of the story and characters are predictable but it’s involving and you’ll get that vaguely perplexed feeling that is the hallmark of Japanese anime. Though the variation in animation styles from Astroboy-type caricature to super-smooth computerisation is a bit too noticeable, the stylistic references to Fritz Lang’s original — Art Deco design and swingin’ 1920s soundtrack (the original was silent, of course) — gives the whole thing a memorable steampunk quality. It is worth the watch.
Guy
