Metropolis comments on such sensitive themes as class struggle and the definition of humanity. All images © 2002 TriStar Pictures. All rights reserved.

Every so often a landmark film appears which advances the state of the art of animated features. These usually project a modernistic or futuristic mood. It is unusual when one is equally successful as a tribute to the past. Metropolis (formally Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis, to distinguish it from the classic Fritz Lang 1927 feature) superbly straddles both the past and the future. It blends the soft, "cartoony" art style of the late 1930s American theatrical short cartoons (Disney, Fleischer, Harmon & Ising) with the latest in computer graphics to tell a drama reminiscent of the sci-fi adventures of the 1920s and '30s; Lang's Metropolis and other such mid-'30s serials as The Phantom Empire and Undersea Kingdom also did this.

The Re-Creation of Metropolis
Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), Japan's "God of Comics" (Manga no Kamisama), is widely credited as the major creative influence on that nation's post-World War II comic book industry in the late 1940s and 1950s, and its animation industry in the late '50s and 1960s. He was known at the time as "the Walt Disney of Japan" (a title which has since passed to Hayao Miyazaki). One of his earliest TV animation staff was Rintaro (Shigeyuki Hayashi). In one of Tezuka's last communications to American anime fans in the mid-1980s, he urged them to seek out the manga of Katsuhiro Otomo, a new writer-artist who was winning his first awards (Domu, Akira). Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis, directed by Rintaro from a screenplay by Otomo (as part of the "Metropolis Committee," the credited producers -- five years in production at the Madhouse studio), is their tribute to Tezuka.

Kenichi, nephew and assistant to investigator Shunsaku Ban, is a new arrival to Metropolis, and Tima's guide.

At the same time, it is their opportunity to have fun, just as Tezuka did when he drew his Metropolis cartoon novel in the late 1940s. Tezuka's first cartoons were published while he was still a student, just after World War II ended. They caught the public's attention because of Tezuka's flamboyant use of cinematic effects (close-ups, tracking shots, unusual camera angles) and dramas (e.g., Westerns, modern crime thrillers, etc. influenced by the movies imported into Japan by the Allied Occupation) while most other Japanese cartoonists were still drawing traditional Japanese themes. One of Tezuka's first influential works was a cartoon-art adaptation of Crime and Punishment. Tezuka always admitted that his Metropolis (155 pages, published on September 15, 1949) was much less serious. In fact, he had not yet seen Lang's movie when he produced his version, inspired by the reviews and plot synopses of it and a picture of its movie poster showing the robot woman. His was more a generic synthesis of old sci-fi movies and adventure serials, with a Mad Scientist named Dr. Charles Laughton (after the actor who had played Dr. Moreau in the 1933 Island of Lost Souls, not the scientist Rotwang in Lang's Metropolis), a master criminal plotting to conquer the world with his army of robots (compare Tezuka's Duke Red with Eduardo Ciannelli in the 1940 Mysterious Dr. Satan), a tough Private Investigator, and a couple of adventurous young kids, one of whom is unwittingly the lost human-looking robot girl Michi (the equivalent of Maria in Lang's movie). When her robotic nature overcomes her innocence and she turns destructive, her climactic battle against the police atop a skyscraper is reminiscent of King Kong. Tezuka's rambling cartoon novel even contains obvious art references from the Disney-produced Mickey Mouse newspaper adventure strip of the '30s drawn by Floyd Gottfredson.