Metropolis (2001 film)
Metropolis (メトロポリス, Metoroporisu) is a 2001 Japanese animated futurist cyberpunk drama film loosely based upon Osamu Tezuka's 1949 manga of the same name. The film was directed by Rintaro, written by Katsuhiro Otomo, and produced by Madhouse, with conceptual support from Tezuka Productions.
Metropolis
- Masao Maruyama
- Iwao Yamaki
- Yuka Imoto
- Kei Kobayashi
- Kōsei Tomita
- Norio Wakamoto
- Junpei Takiguchi
- Masaru Ikeda
- Takaya Hashi
- Toshio Furukawa
- Shigeru Chiba
- Masashi Ebara
- Takeshi Aono
- Shun Yashiro
- Norihiro Inoue
- Kōki Okada
- Taro Ishida
Hitoshi Yamaguchi
- May 26, 2001
113 minutes
Japan
Japanese
¥1.5 billion
¥100 million (Japan)
$4 million (worldwide)
Themes[edit]
Portrayal of robots[edit]
The Shinto religion has a delineation between the animate and inanimate. Shinto kami can be spirits, humans, objects, or in this case, robots. Therefore, robots are viewed favorably in both the manga and the film, but especially in the film, where there is a nearly equal number of robot and human characters. Most humans, like Kenichi and Shinsaku Ban, tend to sympathize with robots, causing the audience to view the Marduks and their hostility toward robots as antagonistic.[4]
Production[edit]
Osamu Tezuka had originally derived inspiration from Fritz Lang's 1927 German silent science fiction film of the same name, despite not actually having seen it. The manga and Lang's film do not share plot elements. The 2001 film borrowed from Lang's film more directly and incorporated plot elements from it.
During the days of Mushi Productions, Hayashi asked Tezuka if he wanted to let him make a feature based on the manga, but immediately rejected the idea.[5]
The film took five years to create.[5] It had a production budget of ¥1.5 billion,[8] then equivalent to roughly 9 million dollars. This made it the most expensive anime film up until then, surpassing Otomo's Akira (1988). In turn, its budget record was later surpassed by Otomo's Steamboy (2004).[8]
Metropolis – Original Soundtrack
Release[edit]
The film was first released in Japan on May 26, 2001. When it was released in the US and other foreign countries by TriStar Pictures and Destination Films, it made a total of $4,035,192 (equivalent to $6,840,000 in 2023) in overseas territories outside of Japan.[9] In the United States, the film was given a PG-13 rating by the MPAA for "violence and images of destruction" and a TV-14-LV rating when it aired on Adult Swim. It was also one of the first anime films to be submitted for consideration for Best Animated Film at the Academy Awards.
Metropolis was first released on VHS, and is now available in North America as both a 2-disc DVD, with the second disc being a MiniDVD (called a "Pocket DVD"), and a Blu-ray.
In both the United Kingdom and Ireland, Eureka Entertainment acquired the film's distribution rights[10] as a means to release the film on Blu-ray in both countries. The UK and Ireland Blu-rays were released on January 16, 2017.
Toho-Towa Distribution, the foreign film distribution division of the film's original Japanese distributor, Toho, also handled the Japanese distribution of the 1927 version of Metropolis.[11]
As the license of the German Metropolis is held by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation, the film was released under the title Robotic Angel.[12]
Reception[edit]
Metropolis received highly positive reviews: based on 67 reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, Metropolis received an overall 87% approval rating, with an average rating of 7.30/10. The site's critical consensus states that "A remarkable technical achievement, Metropolis' eye-popping visuals more than compensate for its relatively routine story."[13][14][15] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 75 out of 100, based on 16 critics.[16]
Film critic Roger Ebert, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, gave Metropolis four out of four, calling it "one of the best animated films I have ever seen".[17]