Days of Future Past: Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis
If you’ve seen Fritz Lang’s early silent film Metropolis, you’ll recognize its thematic and visual influences on Osamu Tezuka’s animated work of the same name: a society strictly divided into castes, an attempt to create a beautiful world via the sweat of the impoverished and outcast and, of course, a misguided faith in technological and social progress. Tezuka’s film opens with this last element: As if watching an old war-time newsreel, in black-and-white we see Metropolis’s mastermind, Duke Red, standing proudly atop the pinnacle of the so-called Ziggurat, a skyscraper-plex of stratospheric height, and billed as the zenith of humanity’s scientific and intellectual progress.
Metropolis’s (2002) action begins as the elderly Detective Shunsaku and his nephew, Kenichi, arrive in the city seeking a renegade genetic engineer. Meanwhile—at Duke Red’s behest—the rogue geneticist, Dr. Laughton, has built the Ziggurat’s final piece: an artificial being with an esoteric purpose. Tima, as the humanoid is named, is destined to sit on the Ziggurat’s “throne.” Unfortunately for Tima, Rock—not the wrestler, but an angry young man who calls Duke Red “father” and who leads the Gestapo-like Marduk party—has other ideas. His interference in Duke Red’s plan for Tima serendipitously coincides with Detective Shunsaku’s search for Dr. Laughton. The subsequent chaos leads the characters from upper Metropolis’s clean beauty down through the city’s social and technological strata to confront disturbing truths about the nature of humanity and its supposed progress forward.
Part carnival, part apocalyptic-noir fable, Metropolis would feel much like Blade Runner or Dark City if it weren’t so much fun to watch. To see this film is to revel in its vibrant, sometimes stunning visuals. One feels almost guilty, like a pauper passing as royalty at a feast, enjoying such a visual treat so lightly—as scene after scene reveals the colorful and evocative evidence of the creators’ attention to detail, in the service of complete realization of a world. The art design is highly stylized: Characters appear as round-faced caricatures, cars and buildings have a nostalgic poster-like quality, and the music places the action in an alternate-dimension Jazz Age.
The world of Metropolis is the world of Osamu Tezuka, known widely for his series Astro Boy and his film Kimba the White Lion (later ripped off by Disney for The Lion King). The director of this film, Rintaro, worked for Tezuka for many years; the latter refused to allow Rintaro to animate Metropolis. After Tezuka’s death Rintaro joined Katsuhiro Otomo (best known Stateside as the man behind Akira, the most widely recognized anime film here) to bring Tezuka’s original world to life as a big-screen dystopian fable of love. If Tezuka were still alive, they acknowledge, the film would never have happened. The two could only make this story live again in the death of its literary father. Additionally, the impact of an absent father looms behind such characters as Rock and Tima, and—to a lesser extent—Kenichi, whose own parents are nowhere to be seen. Parents and guardians in any form are almost completely removed from the film. Metropolis, both thematically and as an example of production, asks, “What happens when a father points us onward but abandons us? What does it mean to pursue the path left for us to follow in solitude?”
In a film named Metropolis the end must inevitably be cataclysmic. What will seize you, though, and draw the film into sharp focus is the film’s denouement. Rock hits the self-destruct button (hey, it’s a sci-fi movie—these things are required), and the Ziggurat’s control room detonates in a moment of silence. Then, we hear—of all things—Ray Charles break into “I Can’t Stop Loving You” at top volume. The song plays throughout the Ziggurat’s complete destruction, and this single directorial choice makes the whole movie worth watching. Like an emotional standing wave, it resonates back through what we’ve been shown for two hours, and many motives that seemed muddled or confused suddenly stand out in clarity. Most importantly, it brings cohesion to a futuristic film that presents that future in terms of a nostalgic past. We reach forward to find and retrieve what we have lost and left behind as a culture and as individuals.
And that is the last, enduring message of Metropolis—that despite the inevitable and semi-cyclical ruination of humanity’s aspirations to greatness and advancement, despite the fracturing and incompletion of kin and kindness, the individual may make new meaning, give love anew, and hold to principles that preserve real life over aesthetic or commercial interest. There are plenty of moments where Kenichi and Tima seem merely swept along by whatever activity is happening in their vicinity. And yet those moments of contemplative stillness and inertia often serve to allow us to see Tima as charmingly—indeed, occasionally gloriously—human in her experience of the world around her, learning and living richly even in the dirty corners of Metropolis.
For more information on Osamu Tezuka’s life and works—which include not only anime but such a wealth of manga that he came to be known as the “God of Manga,” visit the English-language version of the fascinating and interactive official Tezuka Web site: http://en.tezuka.co.jp
An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Paste Magazine ’02 (www.pastemagazine.com).
Posted by Randall Smith at May 6, 2005 12:14 AM