Steamboy, it took ten years to make! BUY YOUR SHIRTS AND POSTERS HERE: store.screenwa... SEE MORE ANIME GOODNESS HERE: benthesage.com #Anime #Steamboy #Review
Steamboy was one of my first introductions to anime and it single-handedly launched me head first into the steampunk aesthetic. For the longest time Steamboy has been up there along side Wolf Children, Paprika, Trigun, Magnetic Rose, and The Cat Returns as what made me into the woman I am today. It's an amazing and formative piece that brings both the visual and story telling quality that Otomo is known for.
I forgot the one of the best anime series besides one punch man, that was the diesel punk epic called last exile ,I ran around the construction site for weeks calling people immehlman.
Only thing that irked me was James' voice actress performing one of the worst accents I've ever heard, It was insane they hired all thisother great British talent for the cast, but the main character completely seperates it.
It's crazy to me how Japanese animation can crank out something that looks this good for $ 20,000,000 while here in the states $65,000,000 gets you food fight
Yeah, but it’s the same with most things that are popular that are made in that part of the world (shoes, iPhones, clothes, ect......) every one likes sausage but nobody really wants to know how it’s made.
Well the Japanese are famous for their value of work and achievement above all else, to the point of their own detriment (high suicide and low birth rates and so on). But I also think it's because animation in general is viewed in a much higher regard than in the States, so Americans are less apt to put as much effort in it (unless it's Disney of course)
Food Fight isn't a good comparison because they would have likely need a very good chunk of that movie getting licenses, as well as having a wider selection of known actors.
Steamboy was unironically one of my FAVORITE movies as a child. As a science and invention obsessed boy, its was mind blowing. Sure it had its faults that anyone could point out but it really didn't matter to me compared to how much I enjoyed and was inspired by it. Not to mention it had one of my still favorite songs of all time, "Collapse and Rescue" by Steve Jablonsky. Hard to explain everything, but just the sheer scale and grandeur amazed me. And the themes, about the cost of progress and how it is used, and who uses it, opened my eyes to a lot of things about our world. Keep in mind, I was like 10 or 11 around this time. Still love the hell out of it!
It's a beautiful movie, with a reasonably solid plot, and likable characters for the protagonists. The less anime and movies you see before you see Steamboy, the better, because it's rather cliche'd, if quite well done.
As a kid who’d never heard of steampunk back in the day, this film was a tour de force. Completely blew my mind. Yes, it has flaws in its execution, but it showed the unbridled creativity and scope this genre can offer in the right hands. Thanks for this Bennett!
As a steam and railway enthusiast Steamboy appeals to me in so many ways. Every credit to Katsuhiro Otomo for doing his research on the Victorians and their engineering wonders, I'm sure good old Fred Dibnah would have loved this film since he too admired the mechanics of the past. I was dead fortunate to meet Robin Atkin Downes (who voiced the character David) at the 2018 MCM Manchester Comic Con.
Actually the Romans burned down the library them selves largely by accident. Every captain or merchant if he/she wanted to enter the city was pretty much required to have log in which new knowledge from whenever they traveled to was written after that it was given to the librarians to copy and the copy was returned to the trader otherwise, no trade was allowed. When the library was burned down it set humanity's scientific progress back by at least 1000 years, truly the greatest tragedy to ever had occurred.
While Alexandria had the largest library, it was by no means the only one. And by the time it was burned down in the 4th century AD, it probably didn't house books anymore. Anyway, the loss of the Great Library by no means have set humanity back to any significant degree, let alone a 1000 years.
@@nuclearwarhead9338 While a loss for architecture, and probably some literature, most information was already removed at that point. One library wasn't advanced by 1000 years.
I remember the credits actually included a bit of an epilogue. While the serious threat was undone, it didn't stop the fact that the steampunk age had come hard to that world.
Bennet, the knowledge of steam and pressure with steam has been known for several thousand years. In addition, many of those were use to power some things. But here's the thing. There was never any use for it on a large scale as other machinery simply didn't require it and it wasn't efficient yet. There were water pumps powered by steam as early as the roman empire, but it simply wasn't convenient
All "punk" genres are based on idea that we take most advanced thing of the time period and turn it in extreme. It is why we have XIX century steampunk and paralel clockpunk (even if electricity was known at the time and used by Jules Verne), Early XX century Dieselpunk (what despite the name is collective name for weird science of that time), post war Atompunk (most known from the Fallout series) and Spacepunk/Space Opera. Beside genres referring specific art styles like art-deco. For the note, core genres like cyberpunk, biopunk, nanopunk are pure SF genres, just focusing on different aspects of developed technology.
I remember the U.S. marketing blitz. Regardless of what the commercials said, I looked at the poster art and the ad and thought, "So it's an animated kid version of The Rocketeer. Eh, I'll pass." Miscalled that one. :(
Same. I remember seeing it back in the day and totally forgetting about it, and man, I can remember the Art of Fighting OVA and three Urotsukidoji ones... If this movie is so good... then why is it barely mentioned or included in most recommendations not only about Otomo but anime in general? Really asking.
Steamboy follows a very old and cliche'd formula of both a young hero's journey from callow youth to hero of the day, AND the old cliche of "inventor makes new perfect but the WAR MACHINE WILL KILL US ALL!"... And it's tiresome. I've seen that story so many times just in regular movies, and even moreso in anime. It's been done. It's been done as much as the evil single god corrupt church trope of JRPGs.
Tarantino is a rather poor comparison. There are dozens more auteurs working in the movie industry. If anything, Otomo is closer to Christopher Nolan. They are very similar in terms of the mainstream appeal, the fascination with a particular theme (steampunk in Otomo's case, questioning reality in Nolan's), the often gloomy tone or premise, the scale and the lush production values of their works.
I don't remember Steam Boy ever being advertised. Saw it at HMV when it came out though. Probably because Canada was like a no mans land for anime in the early 2000's.
Been eagerly waiting for this one, and Sage did not disappoint. One of my favorite non-Ghibli anime films getting the AA treatment. But there's a couple of points that I wish Sage might have emphasized more. Chief among them is that Steamboy was arguably THE great visual work that catapulted the subculture of Steampunk into the public consciousness. In short, Steamboy is to steampunk as Ghost in the Shell or The Matrix are to cyberpunk, the single work that can be pointed to as the transition from a literary culture to a visual culture, the film that showed the world what steampunk looked like and how it acted. True, there had been steampunk movies before; 1999's Wild Wild West in live action, and much of Hayao Miyazaki's work but particularly 1986's Castle in the Sky. But both of these films were easily dismissed in their time as belonging to other genres; Wild Wild West was a period comedy-action flick, while Castle in the Sky was high flying fantasy with pseudo-Victorian industrial elements. Steamboy was the first to be unmistakably, undeniably steampunk. And the world took notice. Prior to Steamboy's release in 2004 steampunk primarily existed as an underground hipster-esque fad, something that had yet to enter the mainstream and had to be sought out by hardcore fans. After 2004 though, its popularity exploded, reaching the point where it was becoming a central theme in popular media; Castle had a steampunk episode, Warehouse 13 is littered with steampunk-esque elements, The Legend of Korra in many ways is an Avatar-ized take on steampunk, not to mention its influences on video games, music, even anime; check out the series Princess Principal sometime if you want to see the thematic torch-bearer to Steamboy. So yeah, Steamboy was the film to make the steampunk genre explode. And a big part of that is my second point: This film is a Victorian Era historian's wet dream. While I am happy that Sage touched on the possible historical origins for the steam ball, I am sad that he missed the importance of the setting as a whole. The Victorian Age was a golden age for exploration, innovation, and optimism. It was arguably the last great age in human history when humanity felt that technology and science would genuinely make anything possible. Over less than a century the world was changed unrecognizably; railways shortened journeys from days to hours, steamships made once nigh impossible passages routine, factories destroyed centuries-old methods of crafting overnight, food production exploded as farms that might take a week to plow by pony could be done in a day by traction engine, a single ironclad battleship could carry more firepower than all of the men-o-war at Trafalgar combined. All of these changes and more are exemplified in Steamboy, both philosophically and literally. Though his motives may be suspect, Edward Steam is absolutely right in his monologue about the ability of science to change the world, as change it it did; through science, foodstuffs were made safe to eat even weeks after its production, lighting by gas and electricity illuminated the night, simple boiling water propelled locomotives stronger and faster than any team of horses to transport people and goods across the world, and TNT and cordite rendered weapons more effective and destructive than ever before. And then there are all of the literal historical references that make a technological and industrial historian weak in the knees, through either admiration of the film's accuracy or through brain aneurysm at its anachronism. 1. All of the trains seen throughout the film are accurate depictions of the Midland Railway, one of the largest railway companies in the UK throughout the 19th Century. That said, most of the locomotives used in the film were designed and built after 1866 when the film takes place. 2. While not 100% accurate to any particular class, the warships deployed by the Royal Navy against the Steam Castle are accurate pre-dreadnought battleships of the 1890's. 3. The "steam battle wagons" that Stephenson's group puts into battle, though modified with a small-bore naval gun on the front, is based on the Hornsby Steam Crawler, first developed in 1905-1910, one of the first vehicles in the UK to successfully use caterpillar tracks. 4. Speaking of Robert Stephenson, he was an actual historic figure, one of the most important engineers in history alongside men like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, his lifetime friend and rival. Stephenson was responsible for co-engineering the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, Britain's first commercial railway, along with his father George, for creating Robert Stephenson & Co. Locomotive Works, one of the world's most prolific steam locomotive builders, being chief engineer on the London & Birmingham Railway, the first true beginning of Britain's modern rail network, for designing the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Straits in Wales, and the Victoria Bridge across the St. Lawrence River in Canada. And I have to say, he's looking pretty good in this film considering he was supposed to have been dead for 7 years; the real Robert Stephenson died in 1859. 5. The Great Exhibition was a real event, often cited as the world's first World's Fair. Held throughout the summer of 1851, it was indeed centered on The Crystal Palace, at the time the world's largest building to be constructed primarily of iron and glass. After the Exhibition, the Palace was moved from the original site in Hyde Park to a new location in Sydenham, South London. The film's depiction more closely resembles the later Crystal Palace, which was vastly expanded from its original form, though the film artists also took their own liberties. These are to name but a few of the true to life accurate elements found throughout this film. As a bonus note, something that might explain some of the questionable performances; the dub directors were aiming to capture not just generic British accents, but accurate regional dialects as well. For the Steam family, this meant all actors had to speak in a distinct Mancunian dialect, a mixture of neighboring Yorkshire, Lancashire, Scouse (Liverpool), and Brummie (Birmingham). It was noted in interviews that this proved a particularly interesting opportunity for Patrick Stewart, whose family originated from the city of Huddersfield, not too far from Manchester.
I like this movie and it's very underappreciated. I think Akira makes a stronger impact on people, and Steamboy drags in the second act a bit, but Steamboy is well worth the watch.
Otomo's works are some of the few that bother and it's a huge breath of fresh air over the normal 3 frame flaps that normally don't even sync with the Japanese voices. That's the main thing Western animation consistently does vastly better even in the lowest budget productions. It'd be nice if other anime could up their game on that.
I actually have that exact case. Also, it's about damn time he talked about one of the six most artistically gifted anime directors of the past 20 years after talking about the others before. Correction: nine most gifted; I nearly forgot about Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Rintaro and Takeshi Koike.
Everything about this movies was great, aside from the most integral part: pacing. Watching it now, I can really appreciate all the intricate nuances in the animation that contributes to the world and characters but damn if my shoulder didn't get dislocated while being dragged through the scenes.
19:40 I know young boys are often voiced by women in animation...but she's supposed to be voicing a 13 year old! I think he's balls would have dropped at least a little bit by that point. I know kids can be difficult to work with, but was it really too hard for them to have found an actual 13 year old to voice this character? 😒
I remember the add for this on Tristar Godzilla DVD's. The same add you showed actually. I never saw the movie but I still remember the song years later.
Steamboy was released not through the Sony label , it was released through probably Sony's lowest end film division Triumph Films. I remember seeing a lot of pop up ads on yahoo, but i don't remember a big push for the movie . It was in very limited release and not released in a lot of cities resulting in a low U.S. box office
I remember seeing a recommendation for this anime, but the recommendation was rather poorly written so I had no desire to see it. Now that I've come upon this review, I think I might give it a spin, however. Also: big kudos for the DMC difficulty joke! Made my little DMC heart happy lol.
Steamboy is hugely important to me: it’s one of relatively few movies I’ve ever cared about to learn trivia. There’s evidence that Molina was requested by Otomo, not least because the character seems to be modelled on him in appearance. The stellar acting cast is ruined for me as a Brit mostly because the recording and direction was done by Americans and Japanese, who don’t even seem to understand that there are different accents every 20 miles in the UK and didn’t see feet to clearly explain that the Steam family are from Manchester. Stewart sounds like he’s from somewhere further East, Molina like he’s from Sussex somewhere and I’m getting a clumsy Cockney by way of Dick van Dyke’s PR infused mess from Mary Poppins from Paquin. At least for about 8 seconds when the first fight starts. The partially controllable physics simulations have become industry standard in anime, so it’s possible that this was just as influential as Akira, though it made far less of a splash. Also, this was the first steampunk movie I ever saw that actually understood that open casings have consequences
Why am I not surprised that Sage considers Otomo´s weakest anime his strongest? It´s fairly watchable due to easily being the best looking animated film of all time, i´ll give it that but, you know that you have a narrative mess on your hand if the credit sequence is the most intriguing part of the story.
Alongside ghibli movies, this one was one of earliest anime movies I watched as a kid, however, back then I could barely grasp what the hell the story was trying to tell and I mostly liked the aesthetic of Steampunk.
I know this video is old. My first experience of Steamboy was getting a DVD from my local Suncoast store, that had 2 trailers and a behind the making of Steamboy. I never got to actually see the movie until 2010 on TV one night and I absolutely enjoyed it.
I'm pretty sure the reason why the Australian Blu-ray was rated PG is because we don't *have* a PG-13 rating. The next one up from PG here is M (recommended for 15 and up...which is what the entire MCU was rated besides the Ant-Man films). Also, "Aussie" is a homophone with "Ozzy", not a rhyme with "posse".
Katsuhiro Otomo with his Wires Hayao Miyazaki with his princess, Castle, feminism, hair shock, and Planes Makoto Shinkai with his scenic shots, Trains, and feets Mamoru Hosoda with his furry fetish Hirohiko Araki with his Villans killing dogs and cats and Western rock music Rumiko Takahashi with her waifu material female protagonists Yoshiaki Kawajiri with his hardcore violence and sex Leiji Matsumoto with his skinny blonde beautiful womens Yoshiyuki Tomino and Hideaki Anno with their anti-Otaku message Shinichiro Watanabe with his Western influences Masaaki Yuasa with his trippy abstract imagery Masamune Shirow with his phallic symbol and kinks Kunihiko Ikuhara whith his Questionably gender complex Osamu Tezuka with his recurring characters from his previous works to another
Anna Paquin did fine in Laputa, which is a similar movie? Maybe that's why?? But then she wasn't forced to fake an accent or play a different gender, I mean James is a young boy so she wouldn't have to change her voice *too* much, but it's still got to weigh on the performance.
I remember getting this movie as a kid. It was truly special while it didn't wow me off my socks as a kid, this has made me really love it. Thanks mom.
I actually watched this movie twice, at like 8 and 11 I think. My dad interpreted it as being anti-capitalist, which makes sense when war-profiteering is often a strawman for capitalism as a whole, but thought it was a decent movie regardless.
Yeah, I don’t get the love for WoH. It was so boring and the attempted rape scene was totally unnecessary and downright offensive tbh. There is no justification for it. It was poorly written and it totally rips you out of the story. Please don’t try to justify it. I ain’t hearin it. Instead let’s talk about why the story moves so slowly and why it’s totally lifeless.
I've watched Steamboy more than Akira. I agree it is the better film. I enjoy both, but you need to be in the right mood for Akira and Steamboy is great on a lazy day off.
Tbqh, I had no idea this got a theatrical release...at all. I don't remember it coming out at all, I don't remember any marketing or anything. And I was super into Anime in 2005. I didn't discover this movie until I randomly saw the DVD next to a bunch of Miyazaki movies and for the longest time I literally thought it was a Miyazaki film, like literally Ghibli. I loved it when I saw it though, it's too bad it wasn't properly marketed and released to me, because I would've been all over it. Though I was too young for Akira to be my introduction to Anime anyway. Toonami was my introduction to Anime. But I still feel like this could have been a hit with me and my friends, it's not like it's that far removed theme and tone wise from Gundam Wing.
One thing I didn’t understood of this movie is that they showed a Middle Eastern we all know Middle Easters r white but in the movie they showed black wtf
My first exposure to Steam Boy was when it was on DVD, my friend bought it and we watched it together. I'd like to revisit it.. after your review I have realized I forgot most of the narrative
I remember watching Steamboy and really enjoying it. It wasn't necessarily perfect, but the steampunk aesthetic, the Victorian era setting, and the excellent voicework and animation really got me hooked on it. That was the kind of stuff I ate up as a kid, and still enjoy today.
I am a fan of all things steampunk and I love anime so I am baffled that I have never heard of this. It really looks like an awesome movie that had the bad fortune of being measured against a titan of anime history. I´m gonna give this a look when I get the chance.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t like Steamboy the first time I saw it, I’d even consider it a massive disappointment, but thanks to this review I might give it another chance
When you brought up the library of Alexandria, I swear my heart broke. Just thinking about how far we could have come if it had remained and if it had been put to better use just... There are no words
Appreciate your review. And while I do enjoy Steamboy, in no universe is it a better movie than Akira. Akira is full of so many iconic moments, whereas with Steamboy I forget the film almost immediately after watching it. Akira is a fever-dream masterpiece.
@@casperchristiansen2458 jesus christ, let it go. There was a lot more than the one, loud, endlessly bitter side who can't stop whinging on Twitter about it.
I'm sorta ambivalent on Steamboy. I think the first I watched it I didn't get it... or didn't care to understand it. I was in a weird phase of my anime obsession around 2004 or 2005, still acting edgy and thought Frank Miller was cool (Oh, how young and stupid and naive I was) so I never really game this film a chance. Well, I'm not the same as I was when I was 20, I have the latest release on Blu-ray in my collection so... no time like the present. Props for mentioning our neck of the woods, mate.
Proof that word of mouth isn't always a boon; I was curious but in 2005 I was 17 and, hate to admit it, influenced a bit too much by what my friends thought. And they were so harsh to this movie. I shall now go buy it, if I can. Thank you for the review, Sage, and for quality that just keeps getting better.
I watched this film for the first time last year. I was dumbfounded at how poorly the script was written. It wasn’t bad, but wasn’t very good. A very boring and uneventful experience.
I don't recall any of the trailers, I just recall seeing the film on the shelf at the local video rental store so I gave it a shot. I don't remember liking the film though. I may have to give it another shot as an adult, because I remember vaguely being bored by the film as a kid. And then Utena...That one I watched more recently, a few years ago. I watched the series and the film and hated both. I went into the series expecting to enjoy it, but I couldn't stand the aspects that most people praise the series for. It just doesn't work for me.
AAAAAAAAA!!!! You're doing RGU, one of the most influential anime of my youth! That movie's a fucking wild ride, so pack your bags sage because you're going on a gorgeously animated, head-spinning trip! I'm so excited, holy shit-
Ahhh Steamboy, the movie that teaches the enemy of good isn't evil, it's apathy that allows evil AND OMFG NOT THE UTENA MOVIE! RUN, SAGE, RUN AWAY NOW!
3:40 ... but I thought David Cronenberg was the director on THE FLY 10:40 how convenient that his name was Hero. Also, looking forward to seeing a movie named NEUMATICA (assuming it’s not supposed to have a silent P at the beginning) for some reason.
Ah..... That uni-bike... Now I kinda remember seeing ads about the movie on TV. Yeah, the way the ads were made where I live, it didn't really seem all that appealing. It seemed like it was politically-heavy (mind you, I was around 12, back then and politics weren't appealing to me as it is now).
Oh boy, Utena. And not even the "20 whole episodes are just useless filler that in no way add anything, with about fifteen of them all having literally copy pasted climaxes" but instead the "they randomly turn into fucking cars, seriously what the fuck" movie!
I missed most of the hype because in '05 I was in the Navy. I didn't see it until two years later when I picked up a UMD for my PSP. I did enjoy It but because it's been so long ago I dont remember much of it. Akira, on the other hand...
