Vibe
Metropolis builds a dazzling future city out of several incompatible histories at once. Rintaro adapts Osamu Tezuka's 1949 manga from a screenplay by Katsuhiro Otomo, while the title and imagery inevitably converse with Fritz Lang's 1927 film even though Tezuka's original relationship to Lang was indirect. Young Kenichi and detective Shunsaku Ban arrive in the city while searching for scientist Dr. Laughton and encounter Tima, an artificial girl created for the powerful Duke Red. As Tima and Kenichi descend through the city's layers, they discover that the shining metropolis depends on robot labor, class segregation, and political resentment. The film's power comes from collision. Tezuka's rounded character designs inhabit monumental Art Deco spaces; jazz accompanies advanced robotics; hand-drawn figures move through digitally constructed architecture; a sentimental friendship unfolds inside a story about labor hierarchy and technological control. Rather than smoothing those contradictions, Rintaro makes them the city's identity. Tima's innocence is politically dangerous because everyone else wants to decide what kind of object, weapon, daughter, or ruler she should become. The climax turns the entire city into a machine attempting to enforce one definition of order. Metropolis remains one of anime's richest examples of retro-futurism not as nostalgia, but as a way of asking why imagined futures keep reproducing old inequalities.
Watch for
- Watch the visual tension between Tezuka-style rounded characters and the massive geometric city. The mismatch is intentional and central to the film's retro-futurism.
- Track vertical movement through the city's social levels. Architecture makes class hierarchy literal.
- Notice the jazz and older popular-music textures against advanced technology. The soundtrack prevents the future from belonging to one historical period.
- Pay attention to Tima's changing self-understanding as other characters assign roles to her; personhood becomes a struggle against being defined as function.
Production notes
BFI identifies Metropolis as Rintaro's 2001 adaptation of Tezuka's 1949 manga, scripted by Akira director Katsuhiro Otomo. Its 50-key-anime survey emphasizes the film's deliberate mixture of retro-futurism and cyberpunk, 2D and 3D imagery, and Tezuka's cute character language with a city built on inequality. BFI repertory materials list the film at roughly 104 minutes. Rintaro had worked with Tezuka-era animation much earlier in his career, while Otomo brought a post-Akira understanding of urban destruction and technological power. The production therefore connects several generations of anime history inside one feature rather than simply updating an old manga.
Trivia
- Metropolis was directed by Rintaro from a screenplay by Katsuhiro Otomo.
- The source is Osamu Tezuka's 1949 manga, whose title was inspired by images associated with Fritz Lang's film even though Tezuka did not simply adapt Lang's plot.
- BFI lists the feature at approximately 104 minutes.
- The film deliberately combines hand-drawn character animation with CG-assisted architecture and movement.
- Rintaro's earlier career connected him to the Tezuka animation tradition, making the 2001 feature a cross-generational collaboration in anime history.
Legacy
Metropolis has endured as one of the major prestige anime features of the early digital era. Its computer-assisted city never fully absorbs the hand-drawn characters, and that visible tension now reads as historically valuable: the industry was experimenting with how new tools could enlarge space without surrendering the expressive graphic identity of drawn animation.
The film also connects foundational manga history to the global science-fiction canon. Tezuka, Lang, Otomo, and Rintaro do not merge neatly, but the feature uses their overlapping visions to ask recurring questions about labor, class, technological personhood, and urban power. In a Top 100, Metropolis represents anime as an intergenerational conversation about what the future has looked like—and why utopias keep building basements for someone else to live in.