A Child's First Apocalypse
It's not so often that you see an anime as deliberately
unsexy as Rintaro's Metropolis. This is not to say
that the film, based on Osama Tezuka's 1940's manga of the
same name, blends digital and hand-painted animation in
ways that aren't completely seductive. Metropolis's
skyscrapers tower to ominous heights, its fires rage with a
liquid brightness, and its core machinery (robots,
factories, weapons, and the struggling lower class) rumbles
with uneasy predictions of disaster. But the characters are
such innocents -- including, to a certain extent, the
villains -- that even massive plots for world domination
are curiously bumbling. As for sex, well, given that the
key relationship is between a human boy and a robot girl,
both of whom look no older than 14, Metropolis is a
bit more wholesome than Blade Runner.
The sensual pleasures of Metropolis (and believe me,
there are many) come in the dream-like visuals of the city
itself, and not in any leggy, busty, scantily clad women. A
relief, at first, but also oddly disconcerting: when the
sexual element, so frustratingly prevalent and, often,
disturbingly perverse in most anime, is completely removed,
along with other signifiers of adulthood, it's a little
like watching children mime the apocalypse.
It's virtually impossible to resist "oooing" and "ahhhing"
over the opening shots. The "camera" dips and swerves
dizzyingly along the sleek surfaces of the Ziggurat, bad
guy Duke Red's (Jamieson Price) latest addition to the city
of Metropolis' futuristic skyline, as celebratory fireworks
burst and shimmer like exploding stars. Unbeknownst to the
revelers gathered at the base of the building, Red has also
commissioned Dr. Laughton, a renegade scientist, to
construct Tima (Yuka Imoto), a very human-like robot girl,
to serve as the Ziggurat's centerpiece and as the eventual
controller of all Metropolis.
Tima is rescued from a fire that ravages Laughton's
laboratory by Kenichi (Kei Kobayashi), the nephew of a
private detective in town on an investigation. As Tima is
not yet finished, she believes she is human, and becomes
strongly attached to Kenichi -- the feeling, of course, is
mutual -- during their escape through the sewer system. But
their love for each other, like the other human elements of
Metropolis, never seems quite as real as the
gorgeous backdrops, except in one late scene. Imprisoned
and alone in the Ziggurat, Tima covers the walls of her
room with crayon scribblings of Kenichi's name. She huddles
in the corner of her bed, her body the only part of the
room not written on, like a visual manifestation of her
separation anxiety and continual search for a real
identity. Consumed with the quest to understand who -- or
what -- she really is, Tima grasps on to the next best
thing to her own self-awareness: the individuality of the
one she loves.
She would do better to look elsewhere for role models.
Boyish Kenichi, along with the other denizens of this
ecstatic fantasy world, has the same simplistic facial
expressions (and, by extension, emotions) as Tima. While
the influence of Little Nemo and other classic
cartoons is very clear,
Metropolis's humans' wide eyes and cute little noses
seem precious compared to their rapturous surroundings.
Doubtless I'd be wide-eyed, too, if I visited such a
wonderland of sensory stimulation, but they live there.
Even the revolutionaries from Metropolis' seedy sections
are bizarrely adorable. Whether they're revolting against
Duke Red and his minions or gleefully attacking the robots
who have taken all the working-class jobs, they look about
as serious as a rabid pack of cherubs. They're only playing
at war. Duke Red registers as a little menacing, with his
vulture nose and craggy brow, but is motivated at least
partly by human loss; Tima, we learn, is made to look like
his beloved dead daughter. His joy in making her the
Ziggurat's figurehead thus seems to stem more from fatherly
pride than a genuine desire to rule the world. When he
fails, at last, it is not because he was too greedy, but
because, like most parents, his expectations for his child
were set too high. Even the villain is, in some ways,
naove; he isn't quite adult enough to realize the full
implications of his actions.
Technically, Metropolis is as much a breakthrough
in anime as Akira, Princess Mononoke, and
Blood: The Last Vampire. Its jazzy soundtrack fits
beautifully with the retro-futuristic look; the climax's
thundering images of destruction are ironically paired with
Ray Charles crooning "I Can't Stop Loving You," bringing to
mind films such as Brazil. But
Metropolis is missing the chaotic, anarchic punch of
Akira, the epic emotion of Princess Mononoke.
In these films, there is a journey towards adulthood, in
one way or another, for good or for bad. The strange
wholesomeness of Metropolis, however, means that its
characters never grow up. When two characters are so
obviously infatuated with each other as Tima
and Kenichi and yet barely even touch, something's amiss.
And indeed, while Metropolis is glorious, ecstatic,
and larger than life, it is also sadly sterile. I never
thought I'd ask for more sexiness in an anime, but there
has to be a middle ground; if Tima never reaches adulthood,
how will she ever find out who she really is?
