Victorian Fantasies

'Steamboy' is an odd Japanese vision of a Victorian fantasy. Japanese steampunk! Who would have thought that such a cross-pollination of pop cultures would have happened. It may appear startling, however, the concept is not new. 'Steamboy' may have been the first anime exposition of steampunk but the manga 'Steam Detectives' preceded it by quite a few years.

Given the other screen and comic book adaptations of fantasies with a Victorian setting such as 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' which features literary heroes and villains with heightened powers, it is inevitable.


Like his magnum opus 'Akira', Otomo, has conjured a convoluted tale involving betrayals, meaningless loyalties, and a foreboding dark future where nothing is certain. Like his previous confused work, Otomo delights in unleashing the forces of the future, namely an imaginery advanced steam technology (the previous work harnesses psychic energy as a weapon), and destroys London (Neo-Tokyo in the previous work) in the process. A muddled cautionery tale of shadowy technology used as a weapon.

The protagonist is hardly endearing. The Japanese depiction of a Victorian world is charmless, yet hardly brutal or realistic, and is filled with bland characters.

I was hoping for a visual feast, never mind the storytelling, I did not get one.

"Nobody stole, nobody grumbled over his rations, the quarrelling and biting and jealousy which had been normal features of life in the old days had almost disappeared. Nobody shirked - or almost nobody."
Exerpt from George Orwell's 'The Animal Farm'