Our tale begins in an alternate Russian Alaska in 1863, where engineer Lloyd Steam (Stewart) and his son Eddy (Molina), amid colossal amounts of rusty pipework and hissing clouds of steam, are trying to perfect their miracle invention: the Steamball, an extreme-pressure device the size of a volleyball which can be used to power large machines without the need for huge boilers. Put a pin in that, we'll come back to why the movie didn't return its budget. This latest release (2018) is presumably aimed at draining the final few drops of revenue from the market to bolster the movie’s otherwise disappointing box office receipts ($18.9m). Steamboy eventually came out in Japan in 2004, and in the US/UK a year later, and has been released in various DVD and Blu-ray formats since, including a lovely boxed collector’s edition which is worth getting if you like that kind of thing. Honestly, I don’t think $2m a year is a terrible burn-rate for anything and $20m is peanuts for a movie feature, but after ten years of cogitation, scripting, drawing, painting and animating, you kind of expect something mouthwatering. The 126min Steamboy spent ten years in production, and remains one of the most expensive anime features ever made, costing around $20m.

I left the theatre breathless, teary-eyed, not sure what I might do next, finally ending up stumbling around another wasted dystopian cityscape – King’s Cross, before they tarted it up.įifteen years later when I heard that its director, Katsuhiro Otomo, had made a steampunk movie, and not only that but with a voice cast including Patrick Stewart (!!) and Alfred Molina, I was almost beside myself with excitement and anticipation. For two hours, it was like stepping into another world.

It did not simply ‘define a genre’ for me, it captivated me. It’s impossible to overstate the impact that movie had on me, in those pre-internet, pre-app days. I’d not been in London long on the dull, grey Saturday afternoon in 1990 when I made a solo trek to the Scala cinema in King’s Cross and, along with about thirty other wide-eyed nerds, had my brain short-circuited by the stupendous Akira, the granddaddy of the anime medium as we know it, which was on a limited run in the capital.

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