Metoroporisu

And since we're on a Metropolis trip, here's a post I did some time ago for Surreal Moviez.

2001 Metoroporisu
aka Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis

Director: Rintaro
Runtime: 113'
Language: Japanese (w/ soft English subtitles)
IMDb Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0293416/
Links here.

Description:
"Metropolis is both a collaboration and an homage to four disparate auteurs. The movie harks back to Fritz Lang’s classic expressionist film Metropolis (1927) but is also directly inspired by the Metropolis manga created by the 'god of manga', Tezuka Osamu in 1949. The movie itself is an interface between the director Rintaro, known for such previous manga adaptations as Galaxy 1999 and screenwriter/ director Otomo Katsuhiro of Akira fame.
The result is a visually stunning and sometimes haunting work, set in a near future urbanized world in which robots and humans interact - always warily and sometimes tragically. The beautiful robot Tima echoes the 'two Marias' of Lang’s film, invoking the specter / hope of the oppressed rising against elite exploitation, but Tima is ultimately a far more complex figure than any of Lang’s creations. The gorgeous quasi-apocalyptic ending also sends us to a darker place than Lang’s vision of hand and heart combining, but that place resonates painfully well with millennium society, whether Japanese or Western."
(from http://austinfilm.org/node/194)


Top aesthetics, top story, top anime. Neither just a simple adaptation of Lang's classic nor a typical techno-fetischistic epic. In its way unique. Just get it.