Steamboy Sony 126 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles Released: 07/26/2005 Reviewed: 03/14/2006

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When I talk about Akira my lust for that movie is near tangible. You'll watch me bob in my seat, thrust my hands into the air, use all manners of words that really aren't germane to that sort of conversation. I'll gesticulate wildly as I quote lines from the (delectable) Streamline dub, pound the table while I detail the deep sociopolitical climate in which the film takes place. This isn't necessarily all that different from the tenor of my normal conversation, it just has a lot more to do with cartoon people. Clearly I'm sorta keen on Katsuhiro Otomo. Why shouldn't I be? The guy sort of introduced me to the medium of anime. Without him I wouldn't have another thousands-of-dollars-per-year obsession to fritter my money away on. The first, quite apparently, is beer, but anime plays a very close second fiddle. Without him I wouldn't be obsessed with cartoons. As a result I'd probably be having a lot more sex. So thanks a lot for that, dood!

Given my history with Otomo it's easy to think that I was mildly excited about the release of Steamboy, even more excited when I heard it was coming to American theaters, and even more excited when I found that it'd be showing in our very city. I nearly vomited my joy right into Joel's lap. Instead of making a day of it, hiking to New York and skipping out on work, as we did with the screening of Akira five years ago, we could spend a couple hours in cantankerous Center City and be done with it. Hey, maybe even Jerry wouldn't be a lamer this time and he'd show up too! Such things didn't come to pass, seeing as how Joel had to go to "Maine" with his "fiancée", but it was a nice dream. After that I kind of lost the urge. I wasn't about to go by myself, and the banter on internet forums seemed relatively disappointed with Otomo's eight year opus. It was beautiful, they said, but entirely too long. Even if the thing were to get about 30 minutes lopped off its overgenerous runtime you probably still wouldn't get much of a manageable movie out of it. I didn't want to believe, I had to confirm it for myself. Who puts faith in those internet messageboard fans anyway? Do you really want to trust someone who dresses up like a cat and prances around calling themselves Pretty Princess Tutu? No way!

Well, turns out they were right. Steamboy is absolutely beautiful. If this kind of animation is the fruit of eight years of planning then I say go for it. The characters are a joy to behold, square jaws and silly mustaches and goofy 19th century English clothing. And on the surface the story is a decent yarn too. I imagine you already have an idea of what it's about. It's a reimagining of England in the 1860s, with this kooky sort of Steampunk aesthetic, a questioning of "what would the future be like if it took place in the past?" Wonderful suits of armor and jetpacks and gyrostabilized steam vehicles populate the world, and Otomo sees fit to throw in his fair share of anachronisms by involving real life people and events. It's just the sort of kooky fun you'd expect from anime, and it harkens back to an earlier, simpler time when cartoons were about retarded robots with retarded supermoves doing retarded things for the 'good of humanity'. Also there might've been a talking animal sidekick.

Steamboy doesn't spend its efforts on silly things like jiggly boobs and giant fight scenes. It thrusts you into the story of young, good-natured Ray Steam caught between the idealistic science of his grandfather and the materialistic, greedy science of his father. It's cheesy and hackneyed, true, but I'd give my right leg to see more of this and less of everything else out there. The only problem is that the movie lets itself get bogged down in the technical details. There's too much time meandering about, bringing up false climaxes, or just plain overphilosophising. Every ten or twenty minutes there's a wonderful fight scene, or flight scene, or chase scene that makes you wonder why the whole film isn't just that. The early movie chase between Ray Steam and the locomotive is almost tangible in its excitement. Why couldn't Otomo just excise a little more fat and make a coherent product? When I watch Steamboy I'm reminded of movies like Barefoot Gen and Akira, serious stories who defy the simplistic terminology that anime connotes these days. I'm reminded of what it was like over a decade ago when I first started watching this crazy stuff, before I realized that most of it (like most of any entertainment medium) is junk and should be wholesale thrown out at the earliest opportunity.Steamboy is beautiful and cool, but it just can't quite reach that brass ring. At ninety minutes it would've made an enjoyable enough flick, but at over two hours it's an exercise in tedium. It's not another Akira for me, but it tries so hard that it's difficult not to respect it.