Search - Steamboy [With Postcards & Comic Book] on DVD

MPAA Rating: PG-13 Content Advisory: Violence Movie Release: 2004 DVD Release: 07/26/2005 Format: DVD - Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV Audio Tracks: English, French, Japanese, Spanish Subtitles: English, French, Spanish SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 2 hrs 6 mins Studio: Columbia TriStar Members Wishing: 4 Genres: Science Fiction, Period Film, Fantasy Adventure, Anime See Also: Steamboy [UMD for PSP], Steamboy [Director's Cut]

Katsuhiro Otomo, director of the groundbreaking anime feature Akira (1988), returns with this visually striking fusion of the past and the future. It's the Industrial Age in England, reimagined, and various and sundry inventors and scientists are arriving in Britain to hawk their products while capitalism rears its ugly head. A gadget-happy British lad named Ray (voice of Anna Paquin) receives a mysterious package from his grandfather Lloyd Steam (Patrick Stewart) -- a tiny ball that turns out to be an engine toting immense power. As it happens, several of these little balls run the O'Hara pavilion, a massive, mobile fortress. Ray later discovers that his dad and grandfather are located inside of the pavilion; his dad, Eddie, has become mesmerized by O'Hara and subject to their whims, while Lloyd suspects that O'Hara may want to use the balls for nefarious purposes, and tries to put a definitive end to those plans. Indeed, the O'Hara people soon take over the Great Exhibition and turn it into a veritable circus for weapons dealers. Meanwhile, Ray starts to develop feelings for a young girl named Scarlett O'Hara. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Anne Suzuki - Ray Steam
Manami Konishi - Scarlett O'Hara
Katsuo Nakamura - Dr Loyd Steam
Masatane Tsukayama - Eddie Steam (Japanese Version)
Kiyoshi Kodama - Robert Stephenson

The 19th century Age of Steam is given a sci-fi twist in Katsuhiro Otomo's Steamboy. This disc does a great job of capturing the epic proportions of the world created in the film and the scope of the action sequences with an anamorphic widescreen transfer and Dolby Digital 5.1 sound, without which the DVD would certainly be flawed. The DVD also includes a featurette entitled "Re-Voicing Steamboy," in which many actors from the English-language cast, including Patrick Stewart, Alfred Molina, and Anna Paquin, discuss the process of voice acting for the film. It is entertaining and somewhat insightful to see and hear actors talk about the acting process in terms of using only their voices as well as acting parts that have already been animated and voiced in their original language. Other extras include an interview with director Katsuhiro Otomo that details the decade-long process of creating Steamboy, which is, likewise, interesting enough for a casual viewer and most likely quite exciting for hardcore fans. Other extras that are amusing but will probably be played only once are a multi-screen landscape study, production drawings, animation onion skins in which scenes are presented through each stage of their development, and a textless closing credits sequence. This DVD also comes with a comic book based on the plot and characters from the film, which is fascinating to leaf through and probably an important collector's item but is only completely comprehensible to those who can read Japanese. The DVD also comes with a set of nine limited-edition postcards featuring characters and scenes from Steamboy and a book containing sketches of every character from the film as well as sketches of various places and things of importance to the plot. Again, these would make beautiful display pieces and could be important additions to the collections of serious fans but offer little in the way of usefulness. ~ Cammila Albertson, All Movie Guide