Metropolis (anime)

Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis

Rintaro/Madhouse
Initial release: May 26, 2001 (Japan)
Also known as: Robotic Angel (Germany, Austria)

This is not a manga review.

I mean, I'm not sure how I could review Metropolis, the 1949 manga by Osamu Tezuka, better known as the God of Manga. Aesthetically inspired by a single photo still of the German film (or so Tezuka claimed — incidentally it had to be called Robotic Angel in Germany due to rights issues) it went off very much in its own direction, a crazy story of the future with a gender-bending angel robot (?) and a murderous secret society in the year 19XX. I found it hallucinatory and extremely difficult to follow, and ultimately I couldn't finish it. What was more interesting to me was Tezuka's art style, which was rapidly evolving at this early point in his career, with Astro Boy — his most famous work — just a few years away. Astro Boy and other big hits soon overshadowed Metropolis, and the manga sat in obscurity for years.

By the turn of the millennium, however, anime had reached an inflection point: new technology, new animation techniques, and rapidly increasing popularity in the west (as part of a broader explosion in Japanese pop culture in North America, aided in large part by the internet) was triggering a new era in anime: sleeker, more cerebral and experimental. Outfits like Funimation and the Adult Swim programming block were making anime accessible to new audiences, and a rush of full-length anime films, some of which had been in production for years, happened to hit the market all around the same time. Fresh off their 2000 cult hit Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, the ever eclectic Madhouse Studios released Metropolis the following year, an extremely loose adaptation of the Tezuka manga. I say extremely loose, but it's probably more fair to say that much in the same fashion that Tezuka tended to recycle characters, the Metropolis anime is like a remix of various characters and concepts from Tezuka's whole repertoire. It's an almost wholly original story that cleaves much closer to the German silent film thematically.

The film opens in the city of Metropolis, a heavily socially (and physically) stratified city somewhere by the Black Sea (we catch a glimpse of its location during a test of some kind of superweapon.) Exactly when is unclear: Metropolis is a crazy mix of the old and new, Gilded Age aesthetics with futuristic technology. Even what we see of the rest of the world seems profoundly Space Age: check out the plane leaving the city at the end! Robots are common, mostly serving in menial jobs, but anti-robot sentiment is rampant throughout the city. The upper levels of the city are celebrating a brand new prosperity; but the light of Metropolis casts long shadows, and sinister plans are afoot: Duke Red, the de facto leader of the city (the mobster-like President being largely a figurehead) is hatching a plot to take over the world, and his adopted son Rock (whom he generally disregards and berates) is leader of a government-sanctioned terrorist organization that destroys robots that go out of control.

Into this mix step Shunsaku Ban, a Japanese detective, and his young nephew Kenichi; they're here to arrest a rogue scientist, whom unknown to them has been hired by Duke Red to build a new kind of robot. Where in most cases robots are quite obviously so, that is to say big, clunky, obviously mechanical and easily distinguished from humans even in their most humanoid forms, this new robot is ridiculously human, indistinguishable from a human girl. In fact, one specific human girl: Duke Red's deceased daughter. One thing leads to another and Kenichi and the robot girl, Tima, wind up alone at the bottom of the city, neither of them aware of Tima's robot identity. Shunsaku and Rock are both trying to track them down, for drastically opposing reasons; meanwhile, anti-robot sentiment has hit a fever pitch, with a full-blown revolution kicking off before being violently suppressed as winter arrives.

Written by Katsuhiro Otomo, better known as the mangaka and screenwriter behind both the Akira manga and its anime adaptation, Metropolis has his hallmarks all over it. You can draw a direct line between Akira and Metropolis: both are high-concept cyberpunk anime films with big ideas and bigger explosions, with a strong political undercurrent that lurks in the background before spilling into the main plot. Both involve sinister figures in power wanting to control a powerful child for their own ends. And both end kind of messily, with little real resolution but enough pathos to satisfy the audience with a kind of ending, which I suppose is one of those true-to-life situations because nothing in life never ends so cleanly as it does in movies.

Madhouse spent decades building a reputation for quality animation and quirky projects; Metropolis is almost overanimated, but hey, I'm not complaining. While the extensive use of CGI has not aged as well as it could have, the hand-animated stuff nevertheless looks fantastic, capturing Tezuka's style well.

While the Metropolis anime is now obscure, I still think it's one of the greats of the early 2000s anime rush, a beautifully animated vision of tomorrow from a yesterday that never happened. Its themes of identity, class disparity and examination of whether robots are worth protecting as thinking, feeling creatures in their own right make it an almost classical cyberpunk story, and if you're at all interested in cyberpunk anime and want something a little off the beaten path, plan a trip to Metropolis today.

-june❤