While he usually lives alone with his mother, his friend Emma and her brother Thomas have recently been sent over to stay until their mother returns from a business trip. Three years later, back in England, Edward's son, Ray Steam, is an avid young inventor who works at a textile mill in Manchester as a maintenance boy, often working on a personal steam-powered monowheel at home.

An experiment in Russian Alaska goes terribly wrong, with Edward being engulfed in freezing gases, but results in the creation of a strange spherical apparatus. They believe the water can be harnessed as an ultimate power source for steam engines (the main industrial engine of the time). I had hoped the movie would be just as gritty and steampowered as possible and it was.ġ863, where an alternate nineteenth century Europe has m'In ade tremendous strides in steam-powered technologies, scientist Lloyd Steam and his son Edward have succeeded, after a lengthy expedition, in discovering a pure mineral water. I'm going to admit, when I first saw the trailer for steamboy I had the shivers. Overall: Great Gears of Steam and Fire! This film is completely worth 2 hours of your time. The soundtrack fit comfortably, and the steam and gear noises were fun.Ĭharacters: Although most of them fit one trope or another, I liked that their personalities were revealed through the actions they took and through their conversations with one another-instead of through narration or monologue or flashback (which, in my opinion, are much less effective ways to develop characters).

The character design was a little plain, but worked. The explosions and things being smashed and broken looked cool. Gears and valves and steam were plentiful. The backgrounds were unbelievably gorgeous, textured, detailed, dimensional, and had a great sense of depth and perspective. And managed to do so without long philosophical lectures.Īnimation: Steamboy is one of the most expensive anime films ever produced, and it really shows in the art. Furthermore, the plot managed to incorporate complex themes, framed through the characters and their struggles with each other because of their beliefs about science and society. Story: The plot had all the elements of a good plot: multiple characters whose actions collided in an exciting and suspenseful way, excellent pacing wherein no scene felt unnecessary or unnecessarily long, and the situation kept getting worse and worse until the climax, which was, admittedly, rather vague. I love all things steampunk, so I borrowed Steamboy from the public library recently.

Steamboy anime