Just so...so bad

Gripping story with well-crafted characters

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Blistering performances.

I wouldn't call this the best movie I've ever seen but it was enjoyable and interesting at the same time. The graphics and the drawings of the background were beautiful. It looked as if it was very real! I would say Bravo to the animators or drawers who were involved doing the movie!Anna Paquin did a mighty job playing as James Ray Steam aka Steamboy. You wouldn't think it was actually a young girl voicing the character. It's not that I'm sexist but I'm just surprised that she did a good job acting as a young boy. I suppose Steamboy looked so teen-aged so I suppose they decided to pick any girl in playing the character in order to no hear a rather deep voice. I suppose it would be a good idea too if they tried that out in the first place but there ya go! I would say this movie is good,it's just not a favorite of mine!

I like this film, but do have one gripe with it; the English voice cast. But, before I get into that, let me address what I do like about the movie."Steamboy" is an inventive take on the steam-punk genre popularized in paper and pencil role playing games, where the Victorian era (typically England) sparks not just an industrial revolution, but a technological revolution where steam driven things are all around. Steam powered cars, steam powered airships, steam powered sea going vessels of all sorts, steam powered robots, steam powered weapons, and assortment of other inventions, all existing alongside a more traditional horse drawn society with buggies, whips, men and women dressing and behaving with that Victorian reserve.Europe is heavily divided by deep cultural and political rifts. Everyone who is mobile gets along well enough, and the working class folks seem to be okay with visitors from afar, but the upper-mid tier autocrats are always in search of more resources. One man believes that an innovation in harnessing steam can revolutionize the world in more ways than one, and embarks on a quest to make destructive devices available to all who are willing to pay, all the while gaining more rewards from his endeavors. His father sums up his character quite nicely at the end of the second act.James Ray Steam is the son of this one man who has dreams and ambitions that could bring mankind to ruin. And he follows a strange cloak and dagger like quest to help protect an innovation created by his grandfather. In the meantime he finds himself befriended by a an upper class girl with perhaps brutal flaws in her character, but who comes around at the end when all hell breaks loose.If I had one real critique about this film, it's that the English voice cast was not up to snuff. Technically it's a better dubbing effort than a lot of anime imported from Japan, but the actual cast was, in essence, miscast. Casting Anna Paquin to voice the young male lead almost works, but I think the team that imported the film from overseas would have better served this movie had they just gone ahead and found some twelve or fourteen year old boy to voice the part, because the adult feminine quality of Anna's voice does leak through here and there.Patrick Stewart is a solid performer, though his voice feels a little stilted, which I'm sure is due to the dubbing constraints of fitting English dialog into a character designed to mouth Japanese sentences. Likewise Scarlett Ohara's rendition of the little girl seems to suffer some of the same constraints--that, and she doesn't sound like a snobbish girl from upper class British gentry; i.e. she needed an accent.The scope of the story is typical Japanese in spite of it being set in Great Britain, where colossal machines and armies of soldiers clash with titanic results. I always feel a bit exhausted after seeing one of these Japanese epic productions that have lots of action and lots of large scale destruction. But I guess that's a good thing, because the Japanese know how to bring you back from all of that emotional height, and deliver good stories.So it is with Steamboy. It's not a children's film as such, though I think preteen boys (maybe some girls) up through the 20-something dem will enjoy it. Me, as a middle aged man, liked the production, but then again I'm that much of an anime fan to like a lot of Japanese offerings.It's huge in scope, has quite a bit of action, it is a bit dark here and there thematically as well as visually, and could stand to be recast for another English rendition, but otherwise this is a solid performer. Check it out by yourself, of if you have some older kids who don't mind seeing the odd cartoon every now then, watch it with them.Enjoy.

Click here for the podcast: http://bit.ly/at2vLS Is the Steamboy the much awaited follow up to Akira a worthy predecessor? One of the most expensive anime's made in it's time, but does it deliver the goods? Where was the money spent and was it well spent? How does it compare with Akira and what are the other similarities? Listen to the discussion of a movie team built up of European Film Snob, a popcorn muncher and a omnivore. In the weekly podcast of small ticket entertainment. The Upodcast reviews this anime classic in their weekly show in detail with a spoilerific in depth revisit. the team also wonders why Two and a Half men is still on TV, we speak about shape shifting sports cars and the drug fueled orgies of a Rabbi.

OK, a movie is supposed to tell a story, have characters a plot and stuff. This is fair enough, but Steamboy it's not the case:This movie is simply a vulgar, wonderful and unbelievable display of power. When i started watching it I tried to follow the story but soon I was totally amazed by the incredible detail and perfection of what i was seeing that I stopped following the story to focus on the real subject of this movie: Animation.It's simply incredible the amount of time and detail that has been put into the realization of this flick: no cycles, no repetitions, perfect blend of 2d and 3d until the end.So, if you are going to see it, take the story for what REALLY is (a device to display animation) and just concentrate on what you are seeing on the screen.