released 11 sep 05 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* At the beginning of Katsuhiro Otomo's Japanese animation movie STEAM BOY, we meet Ray Steam, an enterprising lad of Victorian England with ambitions to be an inventor, like his father and grandfather before him. A package arrives at his home and proves to contain a strange black sphere, which immediately plunges him into a violent conflict between his father and grandfather, fought with steam-powered machines a generation or two ahead of their time. Will he side with his father or grandfather? Or will he defy both of them?
The first thing that can be said about STEAM BOY is that it is a meticulous, extremely detailed production, featuring a flood of imaginative steam-powered inventions rendered in great detail. The second thing that can be said it is that machines are almost all that STEAM BOY is about, since the script is almost negligible, just an excuse for putting machines through their paces. STEAM BOY looks a bit like a 20-minute experimental piece that was stretched out to two hours, fleshing out the plot by throwing in one action sequence after another.
Although the amount of work that went into STEAM BOY is admirable, it is a frustrating movie in that it would have done better to halve the effort put into the implementation and double the effort put into the script. That would have been a gain all around, since much of the detailed graphics ends up being so much confusing "busy-ness", hiding all the ingenuity in muddy visual clutter; something simpler would have actually had more impact.
Katsuhiro Otomo made a big splash with his extended manga (Japanese comic) AKIRA, but he's never managed to equal or even approach that effort. That's a bit of a pity, since he clearly has a lot of technical imagination, and a good deal of plod. I think he would be wise to find a collaborator who can help him put together a story with interesting characters, while he handles the machinery and the production. There's a lot that seems promising in STEAM BOY; it would be a shame to produce another movie at such effort with the same wasted potential.