Metropolis

Combining traditional cell animation with state of the art computer animation, Metropolis wildly re-imagines Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film of the same name. Based on the 1945 Manga comic by Osamu Tezuka (Astroboy, Kimba the white lion), Metropolis conjures a dystopic, unspecified future where a sprawling city becomes a battleground between the elite ruling class and the subterranean dwelling robots, created to run the capital’s mammoth industry. A young boy named Kenichi and his detective uncle arrive into this troubled city to investigate an underground organization whose main agenda is to annihilate androids. As the cities citizens move closer to total anarchy, Kenici befriends an advanced female robot who was created for ominous dictator Duke Red in the image of his dead daughter. Director Taro Rin and writer Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira) combine Lang’s classic tale (apparently Tezuka’s original inspiration for the comic was a poster he saw for Lang’s Metropolis, subsequently writing the story without ever seeing the film) with more contemporary works such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, creating a visually spectacular hybrid of science fiction, film noir and Manga comics.