Steamboy review

Going into this, I was expecting a semi-documentary style anime like "the wind rises" but this surprised me. For me, this was more of an intriguing anime than a fun one; not saying that I didn't enjoy it. The animation was top notch and kind of reminded me of the old (Disney and others) hand drawn cartoons plus as it was set in England and not in space or any other imaginary place made it all the more appealing. There are a lot of engineering terms and ideas for the more technical minded among you and as per the name, it is heavily based on steam powered engineering although a bit too far fetched with some of the ideas. The theatrical version of "steamboy" shown here in cinemas was 103 minutes long (which I didn't get to see) but was released on separate DVDs as the theatrical version and a directors cut with a whopping 23 minutes added to the run time and if you were lucky enough to get this on blu ray then that included both versions on disc for your viewing pleasure. I hired out the blu ray so I could watch both versions and see how they differed. The only notable difference to me was that in the directors cut there were some extended scenes expanding on some of the characters backgrounds and some other scenes of engineering explanations. The director of this engineering fantasy tale Katsuhiro Otomo who also directed "akira" (I should revisit that anime soon) handles stunning visual designs as well as action scenes well and it shows in both this and "akira" however, it is unfair to compare the two films because they are both different. In closing: the dubbed version of "steamboy" is a horrendous affair (although if you don't like subtitles then it might be passable) and I would strongly urge the subtitled version.