Shinji Takagi & Katsuhiro Otomo, JPN 2004

As part of my 25th anniversary as a Vera employee, I was asked to propose a film. The title I went for is the anime Steamboy, a high-pressure spectacle steampunk film with the underlying theme of how to prevent revolutionary technology from being used for the wrong purposes. Director Katsuhiro Otomo, whose classic Akira is well known to many, and Sunrise took no less than ten years to make this film, en passant also breaking the record for the most expensive anime to date. The result is accordingly.

Great Britain, Manchester, 1866. Young inventor Ray Steam receives a package from his grandfather Lloyd containing an enigmatic spherical device, complete with technical data and the warning to take good care of it. Soon it appears that there are privateers on the coast in the form of the O’Hara Foundation, which sends henchmen to get their hands on the super-powerful compact steam engine. Grandpa also turns up and tells Ray that the development of this Steam Ball led to the death of Ray’s father Eddy, followed by the urgent request to flee and deliver the device to the famous engineer Robert Stephenson. This fails, however; both Ray and the Steam Ball fall into the hands of the O’Hara Foundation henchmen and are sent to London. There Ray meets the spoiled granddaughter of Foundation leader Charles O’Hara St Johns, the nuffy Scarlet. He also comes into contact with his by no means dead but heavily mechanized father Eddy, who is working with O’Hara on the Steam Castle, an ambitious project aimed at the upliftment of mankind. Fueled by his father’s vision, Ray decides to help perfect the massive machine, while also developing a volatile friendship with Scarlet. Soon, however, it becomes apparent that all is not as it seems…

IMDb

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