Review of Steamboy (2004) by Kenneth L — 01 Jun 2012

You could pretty accurately describe this movie with the following sentences: Steampunk steampunk steampunk steampunk. Steampunk steampunk. Steam. Punk. This Japanese anime film is indeed the steampunk-iest steampunk movie in all of steampunk-dom. It's expertly and elaborately animated, but unfortunately doesn't really have much of a story after the first forty-five minutes or so.

The story, set in England in 1866, follows a young boy named Ray Steam, third in a line of steam-oriented inventors, after his father and grandfather. When a couple of villainous-looking men show up at his door to confiscate an extraordinary high-pressure steam container (which seems to have nearly nuclear levels of power), he runs, and the movie pretty much never slows down from there.

The voice cast of the English version includes Patrick Stewart as the boy's grandfather. Stewart, as expected, gives a very fine and very dramatic performance. Alfred Molina also does good work as the boy's father. Oddly, the voice of the boy himself is actually Anna Paquin, who does a reasonably convincing job of sounding like a Victorian lad.

The movie was made by Katsuhiro Otomo, who also made the legendary film Akira. The premise and setting of this movie both work just fine, but there really isn't much plot or character development going on at all, particularly in the second half of the film, which mostly consists of one long sequence revolving around an enormous moving "steam castle." The movie's dedication to imagining how Victorian forms of technology might have evolved is thorough and admirable, and the animation in nearly every frame and every background is incredibly detailed. The color palate is probably the most limited I've seen in an anime - almost everything is a drab gray or brown. I suppose this enhances the Victorian setting's realism. However, without much going on in terms of plot and character, by the end it does get kind of boring. If the movie had been rewritten with a greater amount of plot, and a little less utter obsession with all things steam-driven, it would have been much more successful. As it is, the movie could at least serve as a textbook example of steampunk setting and imagery.