The original Android movie – now remade as an anime flick

By Mike Kelly

Fritz Lang's “Metropolis" – an excellent movie that was originally released in 1926 was about an android woman and a mad scientist. Now the Japanese have remade the original android movie as an anime flick. Don’t get me wrong; “Metropolis” is a superior animated film from Japan. In its use of the medium, it's a step beyond American animation. It's conceived on a big scale and doesn't limit itself to the conventions of a children's film.

In fact, "Metropolis" tells a rather complicated, adult story. It takes place in a future America in which humans and robots live together but robots are second-class citizens. The evil Duke Red is working to suppress the robot population, while at the same time employing a mad scientist named Laughton -- as in actor Charles Laughton, the mad scientist in "The Island of Lost Souls" (1932) -- to create the perfect, by which he can control humanity.

Through circumstances not worth explaining, Tima, the perfect android android (good name for a Realdoll – Tima) gets loose before she is completed, and it falls to a boy, Kenichi, to protect her and teach her how to speak. Their travels, as they dodge various henchmen, takes them into the city's lower depths, where the downtrodden robots live, work and plan an uprising.

Metropolis is a futuristic city-state divided into four vertical zones: The crème de la crème inhabit the surface, while underground Zones 1 through 3 is increasingly distasteful. The opening of the ziggurat, a skyscraper built by rapacious businessman Duke Red (Taro Ishida), is being feted when Japanese detective Shunsaku Ban (Kousei Tomita) and his young nephew, Kenichi (Kobayashi), arrive, hot on the trail of mad scientist Dr. Laughton (Junpei Takiguchi). They witness the killing of a rogue robot by Rock (Kohki Okada), Duke Red's protégé and a member of an anti-robot vigilante group called the Malduks; though Metropolis depends on robot labor, the increasingly humanoid automata are both feared and resented. With the human police busy overseeing ziggurat hoopla, Shunsaku Ban is assigned robot guide 803-D-RP-DM-497-3-C (Norio Wakamoto) — robots can't have real names — which he dubs "Pero." Meanwhile, Laughton is working on a top-secret project for Duke Red, creating a near-human android in the image of his dead daughter — but even Laughton doesn't know the magnitude of the Duke's ambitions for Tima (Yuka Imoto). As Metropolis's corrupt president (Masaru Ikeda) plots to quash a worker's revolution and Duke Red schemes to undermine him, Kenichi is stranded in Zone 3 with Tima, who has no idea who — or what — she is.

The film has echoes of Fritz Lang's original "Metropolis," with its underground city and its images of oppression through technology. But the look and feel of this film is much different in this version. The urban landscapes are detailed down to the signs on the kiosks, and the color palette, with lots of somber blues and pinks, is dreamy and evocative. The camera shots are also imaginatively conceived. Director Rintaro comes at scenes from oblique, unexpected angles.

This version is striking Japanese manga animation, a remarkable feat of animation from Katsuhiro Otomo and Rin Taro: a futuristic parable, with something of Kubrick, and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, but with a staggeringly intricate vision of the city state itself, populated partly by robots and humans. The naive primitivism in the strange moppet faces is still an acquired taste, but the gasp-inducing urban landscape is a real wonder, and the swing jazz soundtrack an inspired touch.

The film's music is an unusual and evocative mix of ragtime, jazz and country-western. But some viewers will have trouble reconciling its ambitious story and the oddly mismatched animation styles: Machines, buildings and backgrounds are intricately and realistically rendered, while the character design is disconcertingly kawaii (cute), all Walter Keane eyes and chubby legs (though the "Albert"-series robots' slight resemblance to The Jetsons's mechanical maid is charming). The look is utterly faithful to Tezuka's aesthetic — he loved classic Disney animation, especially BAMBI (1942) — but it's hard to empathize with the angst of a character that looks like a Super Mario Brother.

Currently, this movie is in limited release in the theatres. I believe that all Realdoll fans should rent this masterpiece of android life when it is released to video.

I loved it, I’ll see it again with my fellow android fans before it’s released to video.

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