Striking visuals power 'Steamboy'
In 1988, filmmaker Katsuhiro Otomo drop-kicked animation into the future with ''Akira," an apocalyptic and ultraviolent fable that married the wide-eyed visual style of Japanese anime to the cynical concerns of cyberpunk science fiction. The shock waves of that film are still being felt 17 years later, as Otomo returns with ''Steamboy," his first animated feature since the debut.
Surprisingly, the new film is set in the past: 1860s England at the height of the industrial revolution. But ''Steamboy" is no less frenzied or technology-obsessed than ''Akira." If anything, it's even noisier: trains crash, gears clash, and a humongous climactic battle of future weaponry erupts in central London. But the film is also often immensely thrilling in the most elemental ways, even in a US-release cut that's 23 minutes shorter than the Japanese original. See this on a big screen if you're going to see it at all.
More than anything, ''Steamboy" is a vessel for Otomo's ongoing anxieties about nuclear holocaust and the arms race. If ''Akira" was a cyberpunk allegory about Armageddon, the new film is a steampunk meditation on same, with all-out action sequences interrupted by pop-sociology debates about the purposes of science itself. While this lifts the movie well above the standard ''Pokémon" silliness, when one of the subsidiary characters informs the bickering hero and villain, ''This is no time for your annoying philosophies!," you do feel her pain.
(Note: the film is playing at the Kendall Square Cinema in both a dubbed English version and a subtitled Japanese print; only the former was available for review.)
All this, and ''Steamboy" is a zippy Tom Swiftian adventure, too. Our hero is Ray Steam (voiced in the Japanese original by Anne Suzuki and in the English-language dub by a very convincing Anna Paquin), a serious young lad whose father, Edward Steam (Masane Tsukayama/Alfred Molina), and grandfather, Lloyd Steam (Katsuo Nakamura/Patrick Stewart), are inventors far away working on hush-hush stuff. The action begins when a strange metal ball is delivered to the Steam home in Manchester, followed by henchmen from the mysterious O'Hara Foundation, followed by Grandfather himself. The latter tells Ray his father is dead and sends him scampering off with the widget ahead of the Foundation goons. Brief initial mayhem ensues.
Edward Steam is not dead, it turns out, but he might as well be. A half-human cyborg following an industrial accident, he oversees the O'Hara Foundation from the Steam Castle, a massive gothic edifice on the banks of the Thames that houses several Death Stars' worth of clockwork war-machinery. And lots of ducts. How this got by Queen Victoria's zoning board is anyone's guess.
Speaking of the queen, she pops up to open the scientific exposition that becomes ground zero for the film's apocalyptic struggle for control of the future of war. Participants include Edward Steam and his foundation, representatives from most of the developed countries of the world, and the Royal Navy. Weapons making their debut include prototype tanks, submarines, flying warriors, and ironclad infantrymen called -- in an overt nod to one of Otomo's crucial influences -- ''steam troopers." What Godzilla did to Tokyo, ''Steamboy" does to London, and the nuclear metaphor is exactly the same.
Still, if you're thinking this is an awful lot of ordnance for a movie that preaches pacifism, you're right. The problem with ''Steamboy" -- and it's a big one -- is that it fetishizes what it rails against, in the same way boys playing war shy away from a real fight while inventing ever more baroque scenarios of belligerence. That playground chauvinism also surfaces in Scarlett (Manami Konishi/Kari Wahlgren), the spoiled young heiress of the O'Hara millions and the one notable female character in ''Steamboy." She is, not to put too fine a point on it, absolutely horrid, and she'll leave girls in the audience with no way into the tale.
Boys of all ages, by contrast, will be mesmerized by the relentless, breathtakingly visualized action, even if the characters sometimes seem two-dimensional against the painterly and increasingly vast backdrops of this movie (mostly hand-drawn, with computer-generated imagery used to give the machines an H.R. Giger-style malignance).
At one point, the Foundation building itself takes to the air, the latest example of Japanese anime's taste for flying fortresses. Hayao Miyazaki, the grand master of Japanese animation, has indulged this cliché -- actually, he may have invented it -- in 1986's ''Castle in the Sky" and in the upcoming ''Howl's Moving Castle," due in US theaters this summer. But where Miyazaki is able to invest the image with art, ''Steamboy" finally just smothers it with craft.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
