METOROPOISU (2001) **1/2 Basing a cartoon movie on a 1940s comic book rendering of a 1927 silent cinematic masterpiece doesn't strike me as much of a proposition. Not least because what made the film work was the all-time silent-film performance of Brigitte Helm, which cartoon characters aren't going to pull off. Anime genius Rintaro sees instead only opportunity, and a proper channel for the transcendence of his art, and he was right and I was wrong. Osamu Tezuka's comic book must have been really cool, but I doubt it has anything on what Rintaro renders in its honor; freezing on what I take it are his favorite frames. As in the greatest anime, the genius is in the detail: the proletarian posters are stylized but recognizable reflections of the Russian realities, the multi-layered city reflects downward from a similarly tiered-plot, allegories about and metaphors transferred, to take definition in your own cerebrum. That all, from a cartoon screen. It's the sort of film any history major could watch repeatedly for weeks, picking up some new reference with each fresh viewing. It's not declaratory, though; if anything the over-reaching lesson and dynamic strike me as more readily fitting the disaster at Fukushima than anything (the exception being, perhaps, Frankenstein ) that the principals could have themselves been referencing.
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