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The future. The dream of robotic technology has finally been realized and robots have become the new working class. Uneasy about their relationship with these mechanical servants, humans deny them access to equal rights and keep them hidden away in the bowels of the city.
Power-hungry politician Duke Red plans to change all this by having his daughter rebuilt as a state-of-the-art robot. But rather than introducing some harmonious new order, Duke Red hopes that she will help him rule the planet.
Based on the comic book by Osamu Tezuka (the man behind "Kimba the White Lion" and "Astro Boy"), directed by Rintaro (whose other Manga films include "X"), and with a screenplay by Katsuhiro ("Akira") Otomo, "Metropolis" brings together some of the biggest names in Japanese anime, with impressive results.
Continuing the current trend for combining digital technology with traditional cell animation, the film's textures are remarkably crisp and, while many of the line-drawn characters suffer from being so obviously 'digital free', the backgrounds and cityscapes are richly rendered.
Like so much Japanese science fiction, the film's apocalyptic storyline is influenced by the nuclear age. Writing the comic book in 1949, in the wake of the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tezuka's main theme is humanity's love-hate relationship with technology, and the terrifying power of mass destruction that science has bequeathed us.
Although much of its thunder has been stolen by the later "Akira" comic strip and 1988 film (which ruthlessly plundered Tezuka's apocalyptic vision), the movie's anxiety about science's attempt to tamper with the divine has retained a very disturbing resonance - particularly in today's brave new world of genetic research.
In Japanese with English subtitles.
