I'm not a big fan of Manga I must admit. The movies I've seen have been few and far between and while I certainly enjoyed the likes of Ninja Scroll, Akira and Ghost In The Shell, I've never had much urge to seek out a really wide knowledge of the genre. That being said though, Metropolis has to rank as one of my top five films of all time, not just the animated ones.
Telling the story of a far future world where humans and robots exist alongside one another, it focuses on the adventures of a Private Investigator and his son visiting the city for the first time and hunting down a missing robot called Tima. And what a city it is! The animation, simply put, is stunning. The epic scope of this vast urban world is beautifully captured on screen. It is richly detailed and lit up like a fantastic world of colour, like a fine piece of dramatic art that has come to life. The animation on the characters meanwhile is no less amazing, it is more akin to French than Japanese in stylistic terms, but is still very detailed and beautifully realised.
But this is no piece of aesthetic beauty with nothing to back it up as the storyline is truly gripping. As the boy befriends a young girl, both of them unaware that she is in fact an experimental robot, you find yourself getting swept up in their plight and they have just as much, if not more depth and emotion than any real-life actor's work.
Come the climax, you'll be simultaneously thrilled and left emotionally stunned. This is a magnificent film, I can't praise it enough.
