Anime Review: Steamboy

Steamboy is a film that started with monumental expectations. It was Katsuhiro Otomo’s first non-anthology film since Akira. It was his first project that basically didn’t begin its life as a manga. It took 10 years to make. It was, at the time, the most expensive anime film to make (having begun its life as a planned OVA, with 3 40-minute episodes). It was set up for failure and didn’t disappoint. I’ve finally watched it, and even with greatly tempered expectations, I didn’t go away happy.

So, Steamboy is set up as a steampunk adventure story, with a young boy (literally named Steam), who ends up in possession of a McGuffin that can generate large quantities of steam power, and ends up caught between two factions, each represented by a different parent. One is the British Empire, supported by his grandfather, the other an American arms dealer backed by his missing-presumed-deceased father.

On paper, this sounds like a fun adventure romp. The problem is that it’s much slower than Otomo’s other films, like Akira or his screenplay for Metropolis. Now, I don’t mind slow films provided it does something with character growth and development during that time, or it’s a movie about a process or investigation and uses that time to convey how long that process takes. This doesn’t quite get that.

The comparison I would make would be, “What if, in The Rocketeer, Cliff didn’t actually fly in the rocket pack until the last act of the film?” You, as a viewer, would be kinda frustrated. This is aggravated by a series of images under the credits of the protagonist and various supporting characters going on later adventures, along the lines of the closing credits of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. The problem is that Hayao Miyazaki continued the Nausicaa manga after the film came out. Otomo didn’t.

On top of this, the writing of Steamboy doesn’t treat the women in the cast well. The woman with the most lines is Young Steam’s love interest, and she has an Oujo-sama personality (complete with drill-curls), and is played by a screen actress who has not done voice acting before or since as opposed to other actors who have played this kind of character in the past, and could look at the archetype, see how it differs, and emphasize those elements.

Aggravating this further is, frankly, the fact that Castle in the Sky and Nadia and the Secret of Blue Water exist. Both are Steampunk works with a serious focus on family legacy and characters with McGuffins that can unlock great powers in Steampunk settings. Also, both of them have women in leading roles with agency, inner lives with real character growth and development. Steamboy on the other hand, has the women in the cast serving in secondary roles to the men.

Is Steamboy bad? No. I don’t hate it. It doesn’t make me angry the way that some critics were angry about the film when it first came out in theaters, and later came out on home video. I’m just disappointed. There is the makings of a very good film in here, or a great manga to expand on it, and none of that happened. That sucks.

Steamboy is available physically from Amazon.com (Affiliate Link)

If it is currently available for streaming, it can be found here: