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Metropolis


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v1cious



Joined: 31 Dec 2002
Posts: 6233
Location: Houston, TX
PostPosted: Tue Jan 21, 2003 12:24 am Reply with quote
this movie rocks. defintely top notch material, and without a doubt one of the best looking anime movies ever made.


...so why do so many people hate it?
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GATSU



Joined: 03 Jan 2002
Posts: 15602
PostPosted: Tue Jan 21, 2003 1:01 am Reply with quote
Because it's about robots trying to be human, and that's cliche, unless it's by Gainax, because they're the only company in the last decade that ever came up with original anime because Anno is a tormented soul, which automatically guarantees genius, and everyone else is just ripping him off. :)
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Ferquin



Joined: 09 Dec 2002
Posts: 297
Location: Renton, WA, USA
PostPosted: Tue Jan 21, 2003 3:50 am Reply with quote
I really don't get why people hate the cliché-ness of it all. It's Tezuka! This was material written fifty years ago! Of course it's gonna sound old and outdated because the story is old and outdated! I like this movie because it's got a certain charm to it, like all of Tezuka's works I've seen. It's got a timelessness that I really enjoy.
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Cassandra



Joined: 13 May 2002
Posts: 1356
Location: Birdsboro, PA
PostPosted: Tue Jan 21, 2003 8:23 am Reply with quote
I didn't like it because the story is soooooooooooo sloooooooooow. The cliche-ness doesn't bother me at all.....if it had been a better movie, I would have liked it better. I thought some of the animation was great (that opening scene for example) but it's not enough to carry the whole movie. It didn't want to get me to care about the characters so what we ended up with is a beautifully drawn animation about characters you couldn't give two flips about in a story that progressed slower than molasses. It just could have been better.
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Anime_Freak



Joined: 07 Dec 2002
Posts: 420
Location: Oklahoma
PostPosted: Tue Jan 21, 2003 11:54 am Reply with quote
Well, I for one, enjoyed the WHOLE movie, I lvoed the music so much that I spent countless days searching for the sons in MP3 format, and it paid off as I have em now. But Yes, metropolis WAS good. And That's a fact, Jack. Very Happy
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JETBLACK87



Joined: 14 Apr 2002
Posts: 1073
PostPosted: Tue Jan 21, 2003 1:03 pm Reply with quote
I liked it I guess. cause it was one of the original robot stories. but I didn't like how RinTaro said that Tezuka wouldn't of let them make it. so I guess I don't really like it. good music.
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Dan42
Chief Encyclopedist


Joined: 02 Jan 2002
Posts: 3793
Location: Montreal
PostPosted: Tue Jan 21, 2003 1:08 pm Reply with quote
I don't hate Metropolis, but I saw it the day after I saw Millennium Actress. And that makes ANYTHING ELSE look pale in comparison.
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Tempest
I Run this place.
ANN Publisher


Joined: 29 Dec 2001
Posts: 10466
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 21, 2003 1:10 pm Reply with quote
Ferquin wrote:
I really don't get why people hate the cliché-ness of it all. It's Tezuka! This was material written fifty years ago! Of course it's gonna sound old and outdated because the story is old and outdated! I like this movie because it's got a certain charm to it, like all of Tezuka's works I've seen. It's got a timelessness that I really enjoy.


Cliché vs. Original.

Can something be both?

The thing that a lot of intellectuals don't understand about unoriginality and cliché, is that these terms are relative (which is not the same as subjective). They apply to the reader's or viewers point of view, not on a subjective level but an objective one. In other words its not a matter of opinion but rather of circumstance.

(those of you who have studied physics shoudl udnerstand the difference between relativity and subjectivity very well).

Here is an example:

Lets say that creator 1 writes story A in 1900. "Creators" 2, 3, 4 ... 99998, 99999 copy said story.

Now, a member in the audience has seen about 800 different variations on said story, but never the original.

His opinion of the original, if objective, will be no different regardless of whether he knows it is the original or not. He will find it very cliché.

Even if the viewer or reader is aware that it is the original piece of work, it will not do anything to change the fact that they have already seen the theme hundreds of times.

The author of the original work can not be accused of being unoriginal, however, due to the unoriginality of others, his work will appear as unoriginal and cliched.

Hopefully an intelligent viewer, despite being blasé about something they've seen 800 times already, will understand this.

And hopefully the original, while it appears cliché, it is still good enough to be worth watching.

As for Tezuka's metropolis, he was in no way the original creator of this theme. I can't tell you who did it first, I'm not knowledgeavle enough for that, but I can point out several authors that visited teh theme before him. Most notably, Isaac Asimov.
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Ferquin



Joined: 09 Dec 2002
Posts: 297
Location: Renton, WA, USA
PostPosted: Tue Jan 21, 2003 2:58 pm Reply with quote
Tempest wrote:

Lets say that creator 1 writes story A in 1900. "Creators" 2, 3, 4 ... 99998, 99999 copy said story.

Now, a member in the audience has seen about 800 different variations on said story, but never the original.

His opinion of the original, if objective, will be no different regardless of whether he knows it is the original or not. He will find it very cliché.

Even if the viewer or reader is aware that it is the original piece of work, it will not do anything to change the fact that they have already seen the theme hundreds of times.

The author of the original work can not be accused of being unoriginal, however, due to the unoriginality of others, his work will appear as unoriginal and cliched.

Hopefully an intelligent viewer, despite being blasé about something they've seen 800 times already, will understand this.

And hopefully the original, while it appears cliché, it is still good enough to be worth watching.


I couldn't have put it better. That's exactly what I'm thinking. I know that Tezuka was one of, if not the first to explore this in a manga. The movie is simply a full realization of the manga in animated form. Unfortunately in the period between the original manga and the release of the movie, the themes of robot becoming human and the idea of what is alive and what isn't has been done to death in so many ways. Thus is the cliché factor. I too felt that it didn't feel original when watching it, but I could forgive this because of the fact that Tezuka wrote the story decades ago before robots fighting humans was overexposed. Again, Tezuka's works are timeless, and that's why I was able to enjoy Metropolis immensely.
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Aaron White
Old Regular


Joined: 23 Aug 2002
Posts: 1365
Location: Birmingham, Alabama
PostPosted: Tue Jan 21, 2003 3:16 pm Reply with quote
I haven't seen Metropolis yet, so I can't comment, but I'm eager for the Dark Horse republication of the original manga. It would be fun to compare the manga, the anime, and the original Fritz Lang movie. (It was a silent German movie first, y'know.)

I read somewhere that Tezuka was inspired to do the manga by a movie poster for the original Metropolis; he hadn't seen the movie when he started the manga, so aside from some basic shared imagery his story is basically his own.

Movies like Blade Runner and Batman owe a huge debt to the original Metropolis, and the DVD for Dark City has a bonus feature about Metropolis (the Lang) because Metropolis and Dark City were both visionary urban SF films that were panned when they came out.
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The_Nexus



Joined: 21 Jan 2003
Posts: 4
Location: Wherever the wind blows.
PostPosted: Tue Jan 21, 2003 4:21 pm Reply with quote
I liked Metropolis.... but I feel it's just a ripoff of other works like Anno.... to me, all metropolis is is just an animated version of AI except you throw in a son with some very DAD issues and anime everywhere..... but in all actuallity MI is just a rip on METROPOLIS which is in turn another rip of another anime which is a rip of another anime and so on and so on.... We can't expect for everything to be original.
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LordByronius
ANN Columnist


Joined: 06 Feb 2002
Posts: 861
Location: Philippe for America! He is five.
PostPosted: Tue Jan 21, 2003 8:16 pm Reply with quote
I really like Metropolis. I really, really like Metropolis. For me, it was less of a straightforward story than an experience. Just saying "the animation was nice" is an understatement. The movie is not just relying on its visuals, it IS the visuals. The details, the painstaking minutiae, the sheer visual splendor of sucking this entire universe straight into your cortex with your eyes.

The story is standard science fiction. No better and no worse than any that had come before. What elevates the film into greatness, in my opinion, is the loving detail and reverance with which it was crafted.

And I just wanna say this for the record: it irritates me greatly when people complain about a film being "too slow." Especially since Metropolis is ANYTHING but "slow." For criminey's sake, if anything, the film is too FAST. There's more plot in the first 10 minutes of that movie than most people know what to do with.

Being a good judge of a film's pace is a difficult thing to do, and most people can't do it. Which is why I hate it when everybody thinks they can. I can't do it. So I don't. Whenever it feels like a movie is going a little "slow," and I don't care about it, I say that. I say that I don't care about it.
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v1cious



Joined: 31 Dec 2002
Posts: 6233
Location: Houston, TX
PostPosted: Thu Jan 23, 2003 6:32 pm Reply with quote
hmm interesting


http://us.imdb.com/Title?0017136

perhaps this is the reason.
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ANN_Bamboo
ANN Contributor


Joined: 05 Jan 2002
Posts: 3904
Location: CO
PostPosted: Thu Jan 23, 2003 7:28 pm Reply with quote
The_Nexus wrote:
I liked Metropolis.... but I feel it's just a ripoff of other works like Anno.... to me, all metropolis is is just an animated version of AI except you throw in a son with some very DAD issues and anime everywhere.....


What the hell are you talking about? Metropolis was written LONG before Anno did anything, and WAY before AI. You seem to forget that the story and animation were done many, many years apart.

For example, let's say all you've seen in life is soap operas and teen movies. Suddenly, someone releases an animated version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. They're likely to say, "Hey, Romeo and Juliet sucked because it was totally cliche, and a total ripoff of this one other teen movie." ... Except not really. Same thing here, folks. (For the record, I've never liked R&J, that was just an example.)
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SpikeGriffith007



Joined: 24 Jan 2003
Posts: 30
Location: Virginia
PostPosted: Fri Jan 24, 2003 11:56 pm Reply with quote
Well Metropolis was a visually stunning with amazing graphics but I wasnt as into the story but overall it was good but not in my top ten.
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