Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Sounds like Copernicus has had a blast this year. He would have been fun to hang out with at the festival, and his reports have been a delight to publish. Like this one...
Imagine one of the biggest giants in Anime doing a Jules Verne-style science fiction allegory about the dangers of science loosely based on the plot of Star Wars. This is STEAMBOY, one of the most eagerly anticipated geek treasures -- 10 years in the making, and Katsuhiro Otomo's first movie since AKIRA. Lest you think the plot is drawing on the antecedents of STAR WARS and not the real thing, let me give away some slight spoilers: the main character, Ray Steam, is a boy who must smuggle some plans (and a prototype device) so that they do not fall into the hands of an evil Empire. He is helped out by a bitchy princess and an older mentor (his grandfather), who tells him his father is dead. Ahh, but this is true only from a certain point of view - in reality the father has become an evil cyborg and is building a "Death Star," which Ray must try to stop. There are even Steamtroopers!
Like GHOST IN THE SHELL 2: INNOCENCE, STEAMBOY is a masterpiece, but a flawed masterpiece. In fact, I might as well have done a search-and-replace on that review because the awe-inspiring and dread-inspiring aspects of each movie are almost identical. Both are breathtakingly drawn, seriously conceived musings on an interesting issue, but both have significant pacing issues, and get bogged down in so much philosophy, that they lose a large fraction of the audience.
In fact, a friend of mine at the screening was so frustrated with this he blurted, "Somebody needs to tell these anime guys they are fucking cartoonists, not philosophers!" I would chalk it up more to huge cultural differences between Japanese and American audiences. Sony, who is handling North American distribution, understands this, and is releasing two versions: a dubbed version whose creation was overseen by Otomo, and an uncut, Japanese subtitled version. The Sony representative introducing the screening promised that both versions would be available on the DVD as well. Ahem!
STEAMBOY is not without its flaws, but its positives are so spectacular it is hard not to get some appreciation out of it. The animation is stunning. You could frame just about any cel of animation and put it in a museum, and there a thousand a minute. I could watch it without sound - the strength of the art alone would carry it.
The themes and ideas explored in STEAMBOY will be familiar to anime fans, but are refreshingly presented here in a novel setting and in much more carefully considered detail. It is not surprising that the only country to have the bomb dropped on it is obsessed with the idea of science gone awry. But here instead of demonic creatures being unleashed by unscrupulous scientists, we get a more nuanced probing of the issue. Katsuhiro Otomo has set the film when the industrial revolution is in full swing. Arguably this is when scientific progress first began to outpace our ethical development, so it is the perfect backdrop for an exploration of the devastating power of science unchecked by a moral code. When inventions get out of the hands their creators and into those of even well-intentioned governments, all hell breaks loose.
As with GITS2, the philosophizing can go on a bit too long, hurting the pacing of the film. The pacing is also hindered by certain artificial-feeling obstacles the main characters must overcome. Too many times a character has to pull a lever or turn a crank just in time, before a pipe bursts from the pressure. This is done not just a few times, but seemingly hundreds of times and the cumulative effect is numbing. Unlike GITS2, there is plenty of action, but there is so much you become anesthetized to that as well. The centerpiece battle at the London Exhibition is grand in scope but stretches on for nearly an hour.
If about 20 minutes of lever pulling, excessive talking, and redundant battling were cut from STEAMBOY, it could move from being interesting to being great. But even if this does not happen STEAMBOY is at least an important movie. By confronting the issue of whether the potential for devastation outweighs the benefits of scientific progress at all costs, the film adds to the social dialog that helps our ethical code keep pace with the frenzied path of science.
-Copernicus
I’ve been waiting to see this one for so long that it seems impossible it’s actually screening somewhere in the last week or so. So now that we’ve heard about this and now that GITS2 is in the theaters, all we need is some HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE to wrap the year up right...
"Moriarty" out.
