Original title: Suchīmubōi

In 1987, the global success of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira sparked a huge interest in Japanese animation in the west. Some long-time fans of anime were resentful of the film’s success overshadowing the rich history of Japanese animation that had come before it, but there’s denying that its success opened the door for a new breed of anime fandom. In the decade and a half following Akira, Otomo made the live action horror film Wārudo apātomento horā/World Apartment Horror (1991), a segment of the animated anthology Memorîzu/Memories (1995) and the short film Gundam: Mission to the Rise (1998). But he also spent the better part of a decade preparing his follow-up anime feature. When Steamboy was finally released in 2004, it proved to be another gorgeously designed and action-packed science fiction epic, one that took its cues, as its title suggests, from steampunk rather than the cyberpunk of Akira.

In the 1860s, scientist Lloyd Steam (voiced by Katsuo Nakamura in the original Japanese and by Patrick Stewart in the very good English dub) and his son Edward (Masane Tsukayama/Alfred Molina) have uncovered a supply of pure mineral water in Iceland which they believe can be used to power the huge steam technologies that dominate Europe. But an experiment goes horribly wrong, resulting in Edward being trapped in freezing gas, though his sacrifice leads to the development of a powerful “steam ball”. The prototype and its plans are sent to Edward’s young son Ray (Anne Suzuki/Anna Paquin) Steam who lives in Manchester, England where it almost falls into the clutches of The O’Hara Foundation, a vaguely sinister American company. Ray is saved by Lloyd who appears from nowhere and creates a distraction, allowing his grandson to make a getaway, under instruction to deliver the device to the famous inventor Robert Stephenson (Kiyoshi Kodama/Oliver Cotton). But after a daring race against an O’Hara steam train, Reay is captured and taken to London where the 1866 Great Exhibition is about to open. He meets Scarlett O’Hara (Manami Konishi/Kari Wahlgren), the young granddaughter of the Foundation’s chairman and is astonished to find that his father, now a cyborg with metallic limbs and implants, is still alive and working for O’Hara on the development of an elaborate Steam Castle. After many scrapes, double-crosses and mayhem that involves O’Hara and Stephenson vying for control of the “steam ball” technology, each side planning to use it for military purposes, three generations of Steams have to work together to prevent the out-of-control steam palace from destroying London. During the mayhem, Ray discovers a steam-powered jetpack that allows him to become a proto-superhero.

The story for Steamboy may not be as absorbing, provocative or cerebral as that for Akira – indeed at times it skates dangerously close to being quite trite – but it’s very simplicity and directness is hard to resist. Add to that the gorgeous production design (every frame is packed with detail and texture), the animation is the equal of anything being produced by the standard-setting Studio Ghibli at the time and the action set-pieces are as frantic, noisy and exciting as you could wish for. With is city-menacing battles, flying superheroes and technologically advanced weaponry one can’t help but wonder if this was the film that most of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies desperately want to be. Indeed the non-stop mayhem of the extended climax (underscored with a magnificent, pounding soundtrack from Steve Jablonsky) which takes up much of the final act, taking in an armoured attack on the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, the activation of the monstrous Steam Castle and its rampages through the capital might prove a bit too much for some, often verging on complete overkill. In the States, around 15 minutes was trimmed from the climax to help bring down the film’s slightly unwieldy 126 minutes.

Otomo and his team travelled to the UK to study at first hand the architecture and countryside in order to get the film’s look just right and Manchester, London and their environs look terrific as a result. The steam hangs heavy over streets that strike a balance between the popular nostalgia for Victoriana and the poverty that haunted the big cities of Britain at the time. It’s not a central plank of the film’s narrative but the grim realities of the urban poor in 1866 Britain is ever-present, lurking around the edges of the story. Steamboy is very careful to apportion blame in all directions – the American company is venal, corrupt and willing to unleash mass destruction on London in the name of selling arms, while the upright representatives of Her Majesty and the Empire and no better in their desire to pervert the “steam balls” to their own causes.

The underlying moral of Steamboy – and it is a much more moral film than Akira which remained largely emotionally distanced from the chaos it depicts – is that this kind of technology will always be perverted by someone and that in the end perhaps no-one should ever be trusted with it. It also suggests that there should be some kind of egalitarian sharing of that technology among everyone – “science exists as a power to be used in reality,” muses Edward. What use is it, if not for everyone.” It’s fairly despairing in its view of Mankind’s willingness to use technology simply to make it easier to kill itself and coming from a Japanese filmmaker, the temptation to see the film as a thinly veiled attack on the use of advanced weaponry against civilian targets is too much to ignore.

That weaponry and its associated hardware – from Ray’s steam-powered monowheel to the clunky tanks and gigantic battle palaces – are as beautifully designed as everything else in the film and all the iconic imagery of the best steampunk is present and correct – the airships (one of the most haunting images is of a Zeppelin frozen in a wave of freezing gas released on the city), the whirring cogs and steam-powered engines and the densely realised retro-future milieu. There have been plenty of attempts to capture steampunk on screen and Steamboy is certainly one of the most successful.

It may not scale the extraordinary, genre-defining heights of Akira, but Steamboy once again showed that Otomo was one of the great masters of anime and the fact that he so rarely makes films – his next feature would be the live-action fantasy Mushishi (2006) and since then he’s only made a short animation for the Shōto Pīsu/Short Peace (2013) multimedia project and a music video for Aya Nakano’s song Juku-Hatachi in 2016 – will always be a cause for sadness. There was talk for a while of a Steamboy 2, and the alternate world that Otomo created certainly allowed for many more stories to be told, but it sadly never came to pass.