Review: Metropolis: anime by Osamu Tezuka

Remember that feeling you get when you come across a book or a movie that you never heard about but turns out to be damn entertaining? Well that happened to me over the weekend. Every now and then I get a notice about new offering on the streaming service called Crackle. Well I started digging around in the anime section and I came across Metropolis - anime? Huh?

Here is what the Wikipedia has to say about it:

• Metropolis is a 2001 anime film and loosely based on the 1949 Metropolis manga created by the late Osamu Tezuka, itself inspired by the 1927 German silent film of the same name

Directed by Rintaro and Written by Katsuhiro Otomo. Running time 113 minutes

The cover didn't resemble the posters I had seen of the Fritz Lang version, but I was intrigued. So I took a chance and was pleasantly surprised.

Metropolis is a futuristic city but much in the way it would be if you smashed Blade Runner with Metropolis of Lang's 20s art deco style. Humans and robots exist in this world but robots are discriminated against, not allow to the city's upper level.

The ruler of Metropolis is Duke Red. Red has put everything the city can muster into this super project call Ziggurat. Secretly he has a scientist Laughton to secretly build a humanoid robot to be the controller of the Ziggurat. The final major players (there are quite a few very important players, but I don't want to give too much away.) id Japanese investigator Shunsaku and his nephew Kenichi have come to Metropolis to arrest Laughton on trafficking in human parts and finally Tima the humanoid robot that Laughton builds for Duke who awakens not knowing she is a robot.

Kenichi and Tima spend most of the movie avoiding one group or another that would kill Tima to prevent her from carrying out the task that Duke Red had her constructed for.

In a weird kind of way it parallels the silent movie of the same name, in others it honest anime moral tale. The animation style is more the 20th century than what we have come to expect from animation anime at the end of the first decade of the 21st. But it does have its own charm and is about as far away as you can get from the inspiration as was say the anime version of Witchblade I reviewed last week.

I would check it out if for no other reason than to see a reasonably good anime feature.

Revew: Restored Metropolis

Finally got a chance to catch the restored version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. I didn't get a chance to see it on some of the theater screens showings, but did catch it when TCM premiered it Sunday the 7th.

As I wrote July of 2008 The full-length version of the Fritz Lang film had been seen only once, at its 1925 premiere in Germany and many of the scenes in the original were never seen in America and were considered vital to understanding the film. A full quarter of the film was missing.

Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and explores the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism. What I had seen up to this point was a confusing mish mash of disjointed scenes and plot holes which bore little resemblance to the description.

So when I saw that it was showing for the first time on TCM I decided to sit through almost 2 and a half hours of black and white silent film. A weird thing happens. First off the movie plot and scenes hold up very well. Many of the plot devices are still very much prevalent today. Second I was floored by how many contemporary science fiction films pay homage to Metropolis. It is interesting in hindsight to note how fast that it being black and white and silent stop being a distractions.

The restoration is not perfect. Many of the scenes are either completely made up of the restored 16mm film or just the odd frame here and there. The 16mm film was obviously heavily damaged and do not contain the same aspect ratio. As such it's clear when the restored sections are playing because of the grain, lines from missing sections of the film. But that aside, if you get a chance to see the complete film you will not be disappointed.

wiki article

Complete Metropolis to be seen first time in 80 years

According to this IO9 article, the original full length Metropolis by Fritz Lang will be shown for the first time in 8 decades at next year's Berlin Film Festival.

The original did not do well in it's first release and many people in the government at the time felt that the movie contained too much propaganda so almost 30 minutes were excised from the original film and was afraid lost. That was until the discovery of an uncut 16mm print last year that has since been restored.

The showing next year will be the first time that the film has been view uncut since 1927.

Original version of Metropolis found!!

Michael Hinman at SyFy Portal drops a bombshell. He reported that it seems the complete uncut Metropolis movie, yes the one by Fritz Lang, is back thanks to a museum director in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Paula Felix-Didier has possibly the biggest cinema find of the century so far, according to German magazine ZEITmagazin, with what is the entire film including scenes that have not been viewed in decades! The only version of the 1929 film that was thought to exsist was the Americanized version written by Channing Pollock. The full-length version of the Fritz Lang film had been seen only once, at its 1925 premiere in Germany. The film even contains sceans that were not in the American version and these sceans are vital to truly understanding the work as a whole.

<read how the film was discover and how it came to be in Argentina in the first place>