The action begins when a strange metal ball is delivered to the Steam home in Manchester, followed by henchmen from the mysterious O'Hara Foundation, followed by Grandfather himself. Our hero is Ray Steam (voiced in the Japanese original by Anne Suzuki and in the English-language dub by a very convincing Anna Paquin), a serious young lad whose father, Edward Steam (Masane Tsukayama/Alfred Molina), and grandfather, Lloyd Steam (Katsuo Nakamura/Patrick Stewart), are inventors far away working on hush-hush stuff. (Note: the film is playing at the Kendall Square Cinema in both a dubbed English version and a subtitled Japanese print only the former was available for review.)Īll this, and ''Steamboy' is a zippy Tom Swiftian adventure, too. While this lifts the movie well above the standard ''Pokémon' silliness, when one of the subsidiary characters informs the bickering hero and villain, ''This is no time for your annoying philosophies!,' you do feel her pain. If ''Akira' was a cyberpunk allegory about Armageddon, the new film is a steampunk meditation on same, with all-out action sequences interrupted by pop-sociology debates about the purposes of science itself. More than anything, ''Steamboy' is a vessel for Otomo's ongoing anxieties about nuclear holocaust and the arms race.

See this on a big screen if you're going to see it at all. But the film is also often immensely thrilling in the most elemental ways, even in a US-release cut that's 23 minutes shorter than the Japanese original. But ''Steamboy' is no less frenzied or technology-obsessed than ''Akira.' If anything, it's even noisier: trains crash, gears clash, and a humongous climactic battle of future weaponry erupts in central London.

Surprisingly, the new film is set in the past: 1860s England at the height of the industrial revolution. The shock waves of that film are still being felt 17 years later, as Otomo returns with ''Steamboy,' his first animated feature since the debut. In 1988, filmmaker Katsuhiro Otomo drop-kicked animation into the future with ''Akira,' an apocalyptic and ultraviolent fable that married the wide-eyed visual style of Japanese anime to the cynical concerns of cyberpunk science fiction.

Steamboy anime dubbed