Rintarō
Metropolis

Metropolis Fritz Lang 1927.

Metropolis Rintarō 2001.

I don't know if the great Fritz was aware, perhaps, that one day his visions, his deepest and most candid reflections would turn into legend, uniting in the film of that imaginative, albeit solemn feature film of Metropolis.

Lang's Metropolis is a film of social denunciation that clashes with the tyranny of the powerful. It is sincere love... goodness used to warm troubled souls, abandoned to the unconscious chasm of a sad destiny.

Metropolis is pure science fiction, the first film that consecrated the genre.

Metropolis is also naive adolescent fantasy... in short if you haven't realized it yet, Metropolis made cinematic history.

From that distant German expressionist cinema a lot of water has flowed under the bridges, after all, on the other side of the world in the land of the rising sun, in more recent times (year of our Lord 1949), "the father of manga" Osamu Tezuka partially paid homage to Fritz Lang's film with a completely different but superb and absurd story at the same time.

In 2001, Rintarō's anime Metropolis became a true cult in Japan in just a few weeks, but not in the rest of the world, however. This animated film is not just beautiful to me, but stunningly beautiful; it is a concentration of poetry that reflects in a mountain stream with crystal-clear waters, immersing itself in the dreaming souls of the two great characters...

The similarities with the German science fiction film exist, as do the ones with Tezuka's manga. Dulcis in fundo to further embellish the anime, the screenplay is entrusted to Katsuhiro Otomo.

Rintarō worked for four years on the film's production, using a special technique called "cell animation" which allows the digitization of drawings made with traditional methods, and then subsequently animating them in sequence like true cartoons.

A technique that requires time and meticulous labor, to bring digital animation into an analog context. Rintarō minimized CGI technology, and the result is spectacular at least from my point of view; the colors are bright, vivid, cloying if you will, and furthermore, the graphic style remained faithful to Tezuka's illustrations, making the anime entirely unique.

The story.

In short: private investigator Shunsaku Ban arrives in the city of Metropolis on the trail of a criminal scientist trafficking human organs. Duke Red rules the city, having built a tower called the Ziggurat for the use of illegal experiments exploiting solar spots. Dr. Laughton is giving life, under the Duke's supervision, to the supreme being Tima, a synthetic biological replicant.

Tima is compassionate and suffers in seeing robots enslaved by humans... Kenichi, Shunsaku's nephew, is in love with her. The replicant recalls the beautiful Brigitte Helm, who played the dual role of Maria...

The Ziggurat represents the Tower of Babel, that mania to achieve the greatness of god rooted in the DNA of the human soul, which will not make Metropolis a divine work for sure, but undoubtedly a prestigious one that fascinates and makes one reflect.

A film that I consider a great classic of Japanese animated cinema. After all, the name itself confirms it.