Rebuilding From Scratch: Osamu Tezuka’s “Metropolis” on Page and Screen

By Bob Clark

The old saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I wonder if that really covers the full breadth of data it can store. When we stare at a painting or glance at a photograph in the newspaper, how much information do we absorb and process at any given moment, ranging from the aesthetics of the piece, the social circumstances surrounding it, and our own personal emotional response? Could you fit the human reaction to any given piece of art onto a solid-state hard drive? How many bytes would you need to unravel the myriad of feelings any work of expression can produce, even in a broken, snapshot state? And what about the intellectual reactions– can artificial computations match the speed of human thought, unconsciously criss-crossing all sorts of impressions and considerations in order to decode the various possibilities inherent in a single image? Could that computer then synthesize inspiration? If you fed a single screen-cap into a powerful enough computer, what are the chances that it could backwards engineer something like motion-picture it sprang from? If that computer’s name was Osamu Tezuka, at least it would be on the right track.

The story goes that the budding young mangaka glimpsed a photograph still from Fritz Lang’s epochal classic Metropolis printed in a magazine in post-war Japan, showing Brigitte Helm strapped down to a table with electrodes on her skull in Dr. Rotwang’s laboratory, in the midst of his transformation of his Machine Man into a full-blown fembot. He had no idea of what the actual story was (few outside of those who saw the Berlin premier would until restoration efforts in the past ten years, the way the movie was mangled in various national edits), and indeed would not see the film himself for at least years to come. But it supplied the kernel of an idea for an epic science-fiction graphic novel he was seeking to create, one that would be published as a whole volume instead of being serialized in a magazine, thus lending it a greater air of respectability. Along with it would come a number of Western influences– the high-flying action heroics of Superman, the downtrodden poor and social cruelty of Les Miserables, and so many line-for-line Mickey Mouse facsimiles it’s almost a wonder he wasn’t slapped with a lawsuit out of the starting gate.

The resulting mixture is one that would presage a lot of what would come to dominate Tezuka’s groundbreaking manga in the decades to come. Telling a winningly light pulpy story concerning an evil mastermind’s commissioning of an android with superhuman powers and, of course, a desire to be nothing more than an ordinary human child, there’s a lot in here that will be immediately familiar to readers and viewers of the master’s most famous creation, Astro Boy. The inspiration of Superman is telling in how raw and unformed the first iteration that Tezuka produces here is– not only do you have the superficial commonality of the big-city name that Siegel & Shuster share alike with Lang & Von Harbou, but there’s a myriad of other elements that Tezuka almost unwittingly parallels, from a rooted concern with mad scientists using the solar system as a weapon (meteors forged from the destruction of Superman’s home planet of Krypton in one, radiation from man-made sun spots in the other) to the superhuman figure becoming an out-of-control figure of destruction, the earliestversion from the Superman team telling the story of a superpowered villain, rather than a hero.

Likewise, Tezuka’s superhuman android in Metropolis winds up on a rebellious path of destruction, one that would be hard to imagine from the title character from Astro Boy, and the difference it strikes in the two works is key– as with Lang’s film, Tezuka emphasizes the menace that science and technology can bear on humanity, once it becomes too powerful for the minds that created it to control. At the same time, however, he uses his robotic characters to express social themes of labor unrest and injustice that were just as present in the Lang film, but were there instead voiced solely by the various human characters (the closest his android ever got to humanity was the pure wanton lust Brigitte Helm exuded in her double-role). Like future cyber-rebellion narratives from Aasimov, Phillip K. Dick, Oshii and the Wachowskis, Tezuka imbues his mechanized characters with a kind of soul and personality that makes the ways in which they’re exploited by humanity an offense in keeping with how the Czech playwright Karel Capek coined the name “Robot” in his play R.U.R., after the Russian word for “slave”.  That’s what’s so uncanny about Tezuka’s manga, in the light of Lang’s film and the various reconstrution efforts it’s benefitted from in the past two decades– though the mangaka spins off an entirely original story of his own from that single still of Maria and the Machine Man, the tale he imagines is one with much in common with the themes and subtext of the original film, yet in ways that wind up overlapping one another. Social unrest and the threat of technology are not put against each other, as they are in the film, but conflated into the same rebellion.

When adapted for feature-length animation by the veteran director Rintaro, however, it less resembled the manga itself and more seemed to be an act of transposing as many of the elements from that book back onto the original themes of the film, making it as much an adaptation of Fritz Lang as it was of Osamu Tezuka. In the hands of screenwriter Katsuhiro Otomo, the story at times begins to resemble even segments of his own Akira, with political revolutions and military coups piled on to the already overburdened story. In some cases, his deviations from Tezuka’s text help streamline the narrative away from distracting elements that would later find better expressions in future works– instead of the robot having the high-flying powers of Astro Boy or the gender-bending ambiguity of Princess Knight, we get a cute little moe moppet who seems to be a combination of both Briggite Helm’s personas in Lang’s film– a weaponized robot with a heart of gold. Just as often, however, Otomo’s additions weight the story down and draws the emphasis away from the finely honed characterizations from the manga. On Tezuka’s pages, the reader’s sympathy for the robot child and the rebellion it leads is almost automatic, a reflex from the illustrator’s expert hand at Western-inspired designs. In Rintaro and Otomo’s film, however, it’s hard for any of the individual characters to establish much presence beyond the most thin variety when competing for attention with all the various political themes, which make the mistake of converting the potent subtext of the manga and making it too obvious. What on the page could be read between the lines in film becomes writing on the wall.

One of the ways that the film suffers is how it attempts to add more Lang-inspired elements into the bare frames of Tezuka’s story, in which he managed to unconsciously intuit much of the themes and spirit of the original film already. Adding the human element to the social dystopia of the story turned out unnecessary, the robots of the manga being human enough, already. At the same time, however, it’s stunning to look at the film after reading the manga and marvel at how much of Tezuka is there on screen, not only in the way that they replicated his own creative habit of casting old characters from work to work in his own “star system” (the villainous, sunglasses-wearing Rock gets a big role here as a fascist anti-robot executioner), but also in the ways that Rintaro and his creative team come up with cinematic equivalences of the mangaka’s highly influential style. As in his adaptation of Leiji Matsumoto’s Galaxy Express 999 or his work with Peter Chung on the Alexander the Great-inspired Reign: The Conqueror, Rintaro proves himself an expert chameleon of an anime journeyman, appropriating the design-sense of another artist but injecting all the same sense of lavish movement. Most of the film is composed in jaw-dropping wide shots that seem to mimic the frequent splash-page tableaux from the book, spreading huge crowd scenes over pages at a time to capture the hectic spirit of a futuristic big-city and all the excitement and danger present even in its most mundane moments. The director’s use of color is astounding as well, engaging in a mix of smoky, noir-enthused monotones contrasted with all manner of bright-primaries and cool pastels to portray a detailed, retro vision of the future that’s as inviting to the eye as Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo comics.

Oftentimes one gets a sense of aesthetic boomerang in the ways that the film echoes Tezuka, Lang and the various artists and filmmakers who either inspired them, or were in turn inspired (Moebius and his Incal comics seem particularly present in the big-city designs and color schemes, as well as the Blade Runner and Star Wars designs he lit a fuse under). It’s a testament to the enduring power of Lang and Tezuka that their works can still inspire storytellers of all manner of media decades after the fact, and one can only beg to wonder what kinds of visions might yet be prompted by even the briefest glimpse at what Rintaro and Otomo achieved here. In the future, anything’s possible.