STEAMBOY

STEAMBOY. Katsuhiro Ôtomo (as Katsuhiro Ohtomo), dir. Sadayuki Murai, Katsuhiro Ôtomo, script. Japan: Bandai Visual Co., Steamboy committee, et al, 2004.

Anime. See for Steampunk, a roboticized cyborg father, and for international intrigure and high-tech 19th-c. steam-powered warfare. Richard Scheib compares the film to W. Gibson and B. Sterling's Difference Engine and to Katsuhiro Otomo's AKIRA (1988) (q.v. under Fiction and Drama): "Gibson and Sterling were both the leading voices of Cyberpunk fiction and felt that in order to further their implied social critique the logical place to go was to extend their milieu backwards and create a similar vision using retro-Victorian technology. In similar ways Steamboy is really Akira having been extended backwards—it is the same vision of mass destruction and a similar story taken from a Cyberpunk future and translated to a retro-Victorian milieu", 6 May 2006.