We will conquer the world through the power of steam!

The Movie: Steamboy, directed by Katsuhiro Otomo
Recommendation: Me.
Reason: Akira was an impressive feat of animation. I wanted to see if Otomo could duplicate his previous work of art.

I'm a total sucker for pulp anything. A childhood spent whiling away watching Indiana Jones, Romancing the Stone, Star Wars etc. makes me crave good old fashioned adventure stories. The over-the-top villains, sensational fight scenes, rambling monologues and good old SCIENCE! can keep me occupied for hours. Steamboy was visually and stylistically thrilling in that vein. Though parts were a little reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove (not a bad thing, necessarily), I was thoroughly immersed in the film.

If the pulpy action of the piece hadn't caught me, the beautiful visuals would have. The flavor of the film was in every second of screentime, from the clothing to the gorgeously rendered streets of London, to the captivatingly awesome SCIENCE! powered machinery. It was obvious that plenty of thought went into the devices that the mad scientists created, from the little garage-workshop to the titanic Steam Tower. And then we come to the action, which was done just as superbly as the rest of the film.

We come to problems with Steamboy when it gets to characterization. Though the mad scientists Eddie and Lloyd are thoroughly thought out and well played, the rest of the cast seemed a little thin. Steamboy was interesting, if a little dull, but Scarlett and pretty much everyone else was a paper cutout, a typical whiny girl. She was used to good effect, as far as the imagery was concerned (Scarlett in the warzone was quite beautiful), but as a character she was shrill and annoying. Evidently the English dub of this film was quite good-I watched it in its original Japanese with subtitles, and felt at a few points that I wished the film was in English for plot reasons.

-53/365 down, 312/365 to go