The story follows one James Ray Steam, a young boy of maybe 12 whose father and grandfather are scientists in Victorian England circa 1866. They of course work with steam power, and when they make a discovery that will greatly revolutionize the amount of power one can draw from steam, well, everyone wants to get their hands on it, from the weapons manufacturer company O'Hara to an English scientist named Stephenson. O'Hara has already kidnapped the elder Steams, so it's up to James to try to set things aright. Along the way he encounters the spoiled young heiress Scarlett, who is the sole member of the O'Hara family present and who sort of cottons to him because he's apparently the only other person in the world her age. James displays the family knack for ingenuity, and, during a violent showdown at the London Exhibition, O'Hara's new steam-powered weapons duke it out with Her Majesty's Royal Navy while James tries to rescue his grandpa.
It's all very nicely designed and drawn and the attention to the Victorian setting, from clothes to architecture to the extension of plausible steam powered uses into a sci-fi realm, everything looks marvelous even London managed to look good. There's just one glaring problem with the movie; it's merely a retread of Hiyao Miyazaki's masterpiece Laputa, from plucky boy hero to girl princess companion to a stern lesson about the excesses of technology to the Victorian design to the creepy secret agents to ah hell, it's just a straight re-do, pretty much, omitting only the delightful Dola gang pirates. Steamboy rarely varies from the script, save that the "technology run amok" rant is more stridently but less effectively articulated (Laputa featured a chilling, thrilling sequence with a giant robot waking up and laying waste to the countryside to protect his charge; Steamboy actually has Grandpa stand there and recite the message that technology is bad in the wrong hands (and no, I didn't watch the dubbed version, I never do).
Steamboy is not an awful film, but it beggars the question of why in the hell you would try to steal from (what I feel is) the greatest animated movie ever made. On its own merits Steamboy is okay, maybe worth a rental, but it could never ever hope to emerge from the shadow of its far greater predecessor; if you're at all curious about the genre or just good anime, do yourself a favor and track down a copy of Laputa; why have a Big Mac when you can have a porterhouse?
It's all very nicely designed and drawn and the attention to the Victorian setting, from clothes to architecture to the extension of plausible steam powered uses into a sci-fi realm, everything looks marvelous even London managed to look good. There's just one glaring problem with the movie; it's merely a retread of Hiyao Miyazaki's masterpiece Laputa, from plucky boy hero to girl princess companion to a stern lesson about the excesses of technology to the Victorian design to the creepy secret agents to ah hell, it's just a straight re-do, pretty much, omitting only the delightful Dola gang pirates. Steamboy rarely varies from the script, save that the "technology run amok" rant is more stridently but less effectively articulated (Laputa featured a chilling, thrilling sequence with a giant robot waking up and laying waste to the countryside to protect his charge; Steamboy actually has Grandpa stand there and recite the message that technology is bad in the wrong hands (and no, I didn't watch the dubbed version, I never do).
Steamboy is not an awful film, but it beggars the question of why in the hell you would try to steal from (what I feel is) the greatest animated movie ever made. On its own merits Steamboy is okay, maybe worth a rental, but it could never ever hope to emerge from the shadow of its far greater predecessor; if you're at all curious about the genre or just good anime, do yourself a favor and track down a copy of Laputa; why have a Big Mac when you can have a porterhouse?