Friday, October 14, 2022

NEAR-MYTHS: METROPOLIS (1949)



As a prelude to reviewing the animated movie made from this 1949 Osamu Tezuka work, I read the online scans of the comic. According to available histories, METROPOLIS was one of a trio of science-fiction works Tezuka produced prior to making his major breakthroughs with more popular fare like JUNGLE EMPEROR LEO and ASTRO BOY.



In his commentary Tezuka avers that in that period he did not see the silent Fritz Lang classic of the same name, but that he was impressed by a still showing a scene in which the robotic Maria leads the discontented citizens against the leaders of Metropolis. I can well believe that the mangaka took no more inspiration from Lang, because there are no plot-similarities between the two works. Tezuka's 160-page "graphic novel" is certainly one of the first times the artist tuned into the dramatic possibilities of robots with human feelings, which concern would later lead to the artist's success with Astro Boy. 



In the aforementioned commentary, Tezuka also says that he, as much as Lang, modeled his super-city on the megalopolises of the United States, particularly New York. The early scenes of METROPOLIS don't dwell on the city's system of government, as did Lang's film, but they do display a great deal of wit in depicting a Babel-like confusion of voices of those who live there-- talking of, among other things, a dangerous revolutionary gang, the Red Party. After a brief look at the citizens, though, Tezuka narrows his focus to a scientific conference, also filled with a Babel of natterings, and then discards this trope in favor of depicting two of the opposed powers that will bring forth the novel's robotic protagonist. One is "good father" Doctor Lawton, who has invented a type of synthetic cell with which to build an android, and the other is "bad father" Duke Red, scheming leader of the Red Party, who wants Lawton's android to be a superhuman pawn. (Tezuka claims that he hadn't read Superman in 1949, but it's hard to believe that he didn't at least know the rudiments of that character's appeal.) 



By authorial coincidence, one of the Duke's plans-- using a rare elements to create black spots on the sun-- enhances the viability of Lawton's artificial cells. When the super-criminal finds this out, he's even more insistent that the scientist create a super-android for the Red Party. Lawton does create an android in the form of a young boy, but then creates a conflagration, making it look as though he Lawton and his creation are destroyed. Duke Red drops the project and goes on about his business, which largely seems to be enjoying the trouble caused by his sunspots: mainly that of mutating normal animals to turn into giants. (These include rats that end up looking like man-sized versions of Mickey Mouse.) But Lawton escapes with his android and raises him as his child, naming him Michi (like Mickey?). The scientist also keeps his faux-son ignorant of the fact that he possesses the powers of flight and super-strength, or that, more oddly, he can shift from male to female if an area of his throat is touched in the right way. 



Inevitably, Michi's powers are exposed, and Duke Red comes calling. Lawton is killed, but his associate Detective Mustachio takes over, acting in loco parentis toward the android boy, though still not telling him of his origins. Eventually Michi finds out his true nature, partly due to his interaction with children his own "age."  At one point the Red Party tracks down Michi, but one of the android's friends activates the sex-change device, and the thugs are fooled. But despite many sorties between Mustachio and the Duke, eventually the revolutionary tries to gain control of Michi. 



Michi then goes berserk, and usurps the Duke's control of an army of robots in order to defeat not just the Duke, but all humanity. The city is rocked by Michi's invasion, but the embittered robot boy is defeated by his own biology. Around the same time as the attack, agents of the government destroy the device with which Duke Red made black spots on the sun. Thus Michi's cells degrade because the black spots no longer exist. After he perishes, humankind mourns for the misunderstood artificial human and regrets the Frankensteinian excesses of science.

Tezuka's fertile imagination is consistently impressive, but the parts of METROPOLIS don't cohere into a pleasing whole. Support-character Mustachio takes up so much space that Michi never becomes a compelling central character. As noted earlier Duke Red's schemes seem quite haphazard, as he never seems to take advantage of the chaos caused by his black-spot scheme, and he apparently makes his army of robots just so that they'll be around for Michi to subvert. Neither the sociological nor cosmological themes are explored with any depth, much less the notion of the robot boy's bisexuality. Later Tezuka would get better mileage out of the latter theme in the PRINCESS KNIGHT stories, while Astro Boy's adventures would offer a much stronger central hero. Thus METROPOLIS the graphic novel, while entertaining, is largely significant as a repository of tropes that the "God of Manga" would later exploit to much better effect.

Minor point: at one point METROPOLIS seems to guest-star the redoubtable detective Sherlock Holmes, but the revelation that "Holmes" is just Duke Red in disguise disallows the narrative from crossover-status.

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