Anime Master Rintaro's Metropolis Is Playful, Humane and Visually Stunning

The Metropolis of Metropolis, the visually dazzling new sci-fi cartoon from Japan, is a city of iron, stone and circuitry?towers, towers and more towers, encircled by elevated rail lines and buzzed by choppers and hovercars and zeppelins. The architecture is 1920s Gothic and 1930s Teutonic, with touches of ancient Rome and Egypt and modern urban Asia and America. And yet, unlike every cliched sci-fi dystopia from Blade Runner onward, the city of Metropolis isn't your standard-issue rain-soaked purgatory. It's a sunny place, painted in pastels, crisscrossed by escalators and people-moving conveyor belts, spackled with advertising and murals. It's so big that its bigness becomes a fine, fanciful joke. (It's a joke the filmmakers are in on; Metropolis is likely the only dystopian sci-fi cartoon scored with Dixieland jazz.) The citizens seem to like this place, and why shouldn't they? They have an army of cheerful robots attending to their every need.

I mean mostly cheerful; every now and then, one of them breaks protocol, leaves the area it's forbidden to leave and makes like some sort of mechanized suicide terrorist, at which point it's gunned down by cops or anti-robot vigilantes. But hey, no city is perfect. Directed by anime master Rintaro (Galaxy Express 999) and scripted by another anime legend, Katushiro Otomo (Akira), Metropolis shares a title and some design elements with Fritz Lang's 1927 classic, but the similarities don't go much further than that. Like Lang's dream city, Rintaro's has a dank underground and dissatisfied factions, but it's not a mystical Germanic autocracy; it's a diverse, modern capitalist city.

The script revolves around a very lifelike robot named Tima who was built to resemble the long dead, barely adolescent daughter of Duke Red, a Perot-like zillionaire and unappointed political boss. Duke Red sees his robot daughter as a Golem and Christ figure?a tool to unite and rule the city. (He seems to be allied with the anti-robot underground, but like many animes, the plot gets so tangled up that it's hard to know for sure.) Shunsaku Ban, a kindly detective from another city, protects Tima with help from a boy named Ken-ichi, who tutors Tima and dreams of being her boyfriend. The robot, being a robot, cannot love the boy back (which makes Metropolis a tantalizing companion piece to A.I., which was in production around the same time).

There's more to the story, but there's no point going into detail; Metropolis, like most interesting sci-fi movies, doesn't get all that worked up about plot. It prefers to create a strange fictive space, populated by opaque characters that keep confounding our sympathies. A young robot-hunter named Rock is a vicious, blow-dried sadist in frat punk sunglasses; but he's also the adopted, neglected son of Duke Red, and as the film unfolds, and the depth of his misery becomes clear, he becomes strangely moving. Duke Red is a bland monster of arrogance, yet the look on his face when he remembers his dead daughter makes him hard to hate. Tima trumps them all: she's a haunting, pitiable and sometimes awesome figure. She's at the center of Metropolis' predictably world-shaking finale (has there ever been a Japanese sci-fi feature that didn't end with a Big Bang?) but even though it's Tima's doing, it doesn't seem like her fault.

Metropolis is an adaptation of a same-titled 1949 Japanese graphic novel (or manga) by one of the originators of the form, Osamu Tezuka, who went on to create the first Japanese animated cartoons imported to America, Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. Tezuka has said he was moved to create Metropolis after viewing stills from the movie. Like 2001, Blade Runner and, to a lesser extent, A.I., Metropolis sacrifices coherence in pursuit of Importance, yet it's a playful, humane work. It doesn't grab you by the scruff of the neck and tell you how to feel; it lets you choose to be interested or uninterested, and leaves big blanks you can fill in however you like. Rintaro is confident enough to let a number of moments, from dry slapstick to wrenching emotional implosions, play out in long takes?often from distant vantage points that contrast the characters' smallness against the vastness of their city. The film's attitude toward city life blends awe, affection and dread in equal measure?Blade Runner directed by Woody Allen in Manhattan mode. If you think that comparison's a stretch, stick around during the credits and check out the list of soundtrack musicians. That's Rintaro on clarinet.

Framed

With all the madness downtown, uptown's been getting short shrift. "Across 110th Street: Images of Harlem on Film," a series of screenings at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, aims to remedy that situation (for moviegoers, at least). The rich, representative lineup runs Saturdays and Sundays, Jan. 26-Feb. 17. Among the choice items: 1970's Cotton Comes to Harlem (Feb. 2, 1 p.m.), featuring a Q&A with director Ossie Davis; Shirley Clarke's pioneering, rarely seen drama The Cool World (Feb. 9, 2 p.m.); Showtime at the Apollo shorts, featuring performances by Lionel Hampton, Bill Bailey, Dinah Washington and the Clovers (Feb. 9, 4:30 p.m.) and Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughan (Feb. 17, 2 p.m.); and a rare big-screen showing of Francis Coppola's 1984 extravaganza The Cotton Club (Feb. 10, 4 p.m.), which was predictably drubbed on first release, but looks better by the year. For information, call 718-784-0077 or visit the website, ammi.org.

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Cabin fever: Canadian director Gary Burns' waydowntown has a great premise and doesn't do enough with it, but it's enjoyable. The plot has four pals in Calgary betting a month's salary to see who can spend the most time inside the wintry city's elevated pedestrian walkways; given the stultifying blandness of downtown life, you can bet they'll crack sooner rather than later. Burns' direction is a tad busy and slick, but he gets good performances from his capable cast. The best of the bunch is sad-eyed Don McKellar, the screenwriter of 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould and The Red Violin, who just happens to be one of the most appealing young character actors in movies. Intriguingly, McKellar addressed some of the same themes in his own film, Last Night, which may be the only dry, repressed social comedy about the end of the world. It's on tape, and well worth renting.

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And many more? Last week's mailbag had a wonderful letter from Ted Klein of Manhattan responding to my piece on 2001. In it, he proposed that Kubrick's classic is preoccupied with birthdays, and offered a compelling list of examples, including the birthday party of Heywood Floyd's daughter and the birthday message sent to astronaut Frank Poole by his parents in the Jupiter mission sequence. I can think of at least two more items that belong on the list: the deactivation of HAL, where the computer plays memory tapes of the day he was introduced to the world (his birthday), and the film's final image of the starchild: humankind reborn.