Steamboy

Steamboy (2004)

This Anime is set in England during the 1860s and focuses on the youngest member of a family of inventers, James Ray Steam. Of course being the 1860s the power source used for their inventions is steam, so the name works out pretty well for them. James is the man of the family while his father and grandfather are off working for a big American company in Alaska on a secret project. But when a package shows up at the family home, quickly followed by agents of the company and James’ grandfather things get a bit crazy. Soon both the company and the British government are pursuing James as they pursue the package. Inside the package is the Steamball, an invention by James’ grandfather that can power the most amazing inventions. If that weren’t enough James has to choose between his father and grandfather, who disagree on how to use the power of the Steamball on, as well as what to do with their greatest invention the steam castle.

This is a difficult movie to try and review. First of all the story starts off very interesting and entertaining, but then starts to slow down to a sleep inducing crawl. Even the ending of the movie, which should be exciting just keeps dragging on far longer than it needs to. I think that this movie falls into the curse of many Anime movies that I’ve watched. The people working on the film seem to become so enamored about how cool the movie looks that they forget they still need to tell a cohesive and interesting story. The movie is over two hours long and could stand to lose maybe thirty or forty minutes. But instead we are treated to long shots of intricately animated gears and machinery. Now this is beautiful animation and honestly some of the best that I’ve ever seen, but it ends up hurting the pacing of the film and therefore makes the movie not as good as it could have been.

Now I need to talk a little bit about the cast of voice actors. The movie boasts Patrick Stewart (Star Trek the Next Generation, X-Men), Anna Paquin (X-Men), and Alfred Molina (Identity, Spiderman 2). But other than Patrick Stewart none of them were even recognizable. I tried to figure out what that was and the only thing that I can think of is that this movie was finished with Japanese voice actors and these actors just came in to read the translated dialogue. I think that may have something to do with the complete lack of personality in any of the voice performances. I’d have to say that I found the whole thing disappointing and sort of wish that they had hired no name actors for the voices.

Judged upon character and story this is at best a mediocre movie that doesn’t deliver. But I know that there are some Anime fans that can sit thru some pretty dreadful stuff if the animation is good enough. You will be hard pressed to find a better-drawn movie than Steamboy, and if that is how you judge your Anime then you might really like this. Unfortunately I like a good story and characters.

2 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer