Steamboy

With Lauren away at a conference for the weekend, I take the opportunity to watch stuff she couldn't care less about. Friday night I watched Steamboy, the latest anime from Katsuhiro Ôtomo (writer/director of Akira among many others). What I liked was the look of the whole thing. It wasn't a particularly novel design, basically just steampunk, but it was still impressive to look at. The animation was also excellent, I think there was some 3d blended with the traditional animation. What I didn't like was the repetitiveness and the general anime confusion. Massive steam powered engines running amuck in Victorian London is fun, but 2 hours of valves and steampuffs was a little much. Maybe some of the nuances of the story are lost in translation (I had Japanese audio with English subtitles, no dubs for me!), but in any event there was a lot that didn't make sense. That might just be a problem I have with anime, as it's a common experience for me - but in any event, I can ignore that and just enjoy what I do understand.