Product Details

• Actors: Anna Paquin, Patrick Stewart, Alfred Molina, Shigeru Chiba, Hisao Egawa
• Directors: Katsuhiro Ohtomo, Kôji Morimoto, Tensai Okamura
• Writers: Katsuhiro Ohtomo, Sadayuki Murai, Satoshi Kon
• Producers: Katsuhiro Ohtomo, Hideyuki Tomioka
• Format: Animated, Box set, Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: Portuguese (Dolby Digital 2.0), English (Dolby Digital 5.1), French (Dolby Digital 2.0), Japanese (Dolby Digital 5.1), Spanish (Dolby Digital 2.0)
• Subtitles: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese
• Region: Region 1 encoding (US and Canada only)
  PLEASE NOTE: Some Region 1 DVDs may contain Regional Coding Enhancement (RCE). Some, but not all, of our international customers have had problems playing these enhanced discs on what are called "region-free" DVD players. For more information on RCE, click here.
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Rated: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
• DVD Release Date: July 26, 2005
• Run Time: 240 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0009P42TQ
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #48,099 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Steamboy/Memories" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Rei is a young inventor living in the u.K. In the middle of the 19th century. Before the 1st ever world expo a marvelous invention called the steam ball behind which a menacing power is hidden arrives from his grandfather in the u.S. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 05/11/2005 Starring: Voices Of Anna Paquin Alfred Molina Run time: 126 minutes Rating: Pg13

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Post-Akira visionary anime from Katsuhiro Otomo, November 9, 2005

By 

Daniel Jolley "darkgenius" (Shelby, North Carolina USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Steamboy/Memories (DVD)

Here's a rarity - a combo of two movies that are actually related to one another. The connection is Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame. Memories (1995) consists of three stories adapted from short manga pieces by Otomo, the last of which, Cannon Fodder, was directed by Otomo himself. Steamboy was released in 2004, Otomo's first full-length anime film since Akira. It looks great, but the plot doesn't build up much steam.

Memories is a most interesting and impressive production made up of three very different short films directed by some of the leading names in anime. Episode One is Magnetic Rose, directed by Koji Morimoto of Animatrix fame. This is a beautiful, haunting tale of a most unusual space rescue mission. The crew of a space garbage collection ship responds to a distress signal from a dead part of space. Two crew members board the debris-shrouded vessel and enter a completely different world, one fueled by the memories of a beautiful young opera singer who apparently retreated to the isolation of space following a tragedy in her life. Each man is soon drawn into the vivid, colorful world of Eva's memories, but only one recognizes the unreality behind the vivid scenes he encounters - in his case, though, memories of his own wife and child serve as fuel for the increasingly realistic episodes he experiences. Much of the story takes place to a soundtrack of beautiful opera music such as that of Puccini, and the combination of such grand music and the amazing visual miracles that define anime of the highest caliber make this a most powerful film indeed.

Episode Two, Stink Bomb from director Tensai Okamura, goes in a completely different direction. Existing in some nebulous space between dark comedy and grim political satire, Stink Bomb is certainly entertaining but much less powerful than the other two films. A young scientific researcher takes an experimental fever pill that turns out to be something else entirely. He awakes to find everyone in the building comatose or dead, and panicked company executives order him to find the pills and the secret documentation related to them so that he can bring everything to them in Tokyo immediately. He does just that, but he comes across death and destruction everywhere he goes, without understanding that he has become a biological weapon emanating deadly gas from within his own body. It's almost comical to see the military firepower brought to bear - quite fruitlessly - against him as the military seeks to stop the spread of the noxious gas. The ending is somewhat comical - but on a dark level.

The last and shortest of the films was directed by Katsuhiro Otomo himself. Cannon Fodder is an extremely dark film that vividly portrays a day in the life of a militaristic society along the lines of a post-modern day Prussia dedicated solely to the continued firing of gigantic cannons against some nebulous enemy. The obvious interpretation is one of the insanity of warfare, and the dark tones and grimly drawn characters bring the message home in a powerful fashion. Interestingly, the entire action seems to consist of one continuous shot that moves fluidly from one scene to another.

I have to say that I enjoyed Otomo's directorial contribution to the film Memories more than I did Steamboy. Both share the same kind of heavily industrial world of the past, cast in sepia-like tones reflecting an atmosphere of gloom. That was more than okay for Memories' "Cannon Fodder," but the world of Steamboy eventually grew tiresome to me. The animation of this film is excellent, but it consisted of far too many scenes of exploding machinery, to the detriment of character development and storyline. Frankly, I just didn't care about this plot all that much.

You've got a young, inventive boy who finds himself in the middle of a conflict over the nature of science. It's an argument that will erupt in loud, frightening chaos over the city of London. The boy's name is Ray Steam, and steam is definitely the key word in all of this. Ray receives a parcel from his grandfather containing an ultra-powerful "steamball," and almost at once he's forced to honor his grandfather's request to keep it out of the hands of "the Foundation." His father, however, or at least a somewhat mechanized version of him, happens to be in cahoots with the Foundation, and he begins to win his son over to his own version of science. He has used the vast power of steam to take his own father's vision of a Steam Castle and turn it into a well-armed weapon, complete with steam-powered flyers, subs, and mechanized fighters. The grandfather shows up to try and sabotage his evil son's efforts, and he confronts Ray with his own peaceful vision of science. Fortunately for the audience, there's a spoiled little rich girl (by the name of Scarlett O'Hara - I kid you not) to add some life to all this philosophizing and artificiality. The whole thing soon breaks down into a not-so-small war over London. If you like explosions and scenes of utter destruction in your anime, you'll definitely want to check out Steamboy. That's about all you'll find in the second half of the film.

To me, Steamboy is a case of style over substance. None of the characters are as fully developed as I would have liked, and the whole story never manages to take on very much depth. Motion pictures, even anime, cannot live on cinematography alone if they want to be truly successful. With its underdeveloped storyline, Steamboy just didn't prove satisfying to me.

5.0 out of 5 stars Steam Boy, The Movie, December 5, 2011

By 

C. Klinger "Curtious" (Denver) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Steamboy/Memories (DVD)

Visually stunning animation! Steam Boy is a beautifully written story complete with captivating plot and engaging characters.
Step back in time to when steam was the world's primary source of motive power. Two scientists / inventors, father and son have developed a ball that will hold super compressed steam. Money corrupts. We are then introduced to the third generation, Ray - the Steam Boy; he too is a genius. In a classic battle between good and evil, where the line is unclear, Ray has to discover who is to be trusted and who is wanting the steam-ball for their own bent aspirations.

4.0 out of 5 stars Memories of Steamboy, April 28, 2007

By 

E. A Solinas "ea_solinas" (MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Steamboy/Memories (DVD)

For many people, anime means bright colours, watery eyes and big-breasted women.

But it can also mean some gloriously complex, maturely-scripted creations, which just happen to be animated. Two good examples are the steampunk epic "Steamboy," and the three short movies that make up "Memories." They're exquisitely detailed, darkly amusing, and definitely worth seeing.

As his follow-up to "Akira," Katsuhiro Ôtomo spent a staggering eight years producing "Steamboy," a stellar example of anime steampunk. It's full of detailed animation, solid direction and some really inspired action scenes, although the final fourth is extremely bloated. Dark, detailed, gritty and full of smoke, steam and grime.

In the mid 1800s, Dr. Lloyd Steam (Patrick Stewart) and his son Eddie Steam (Alfred Molina) are involved in top secret experimentation for the O'Hara Corporation. There's a disaster which leaves only one machine intact -- the Steam Ball. Then Eddie's son Ray (Anna Paquin), a budding inventer, gets the Steam Ball in the mail -- and some thuggish Foundation men destroying the house to get the valuable machine. Ray escapes with the Ball, barely eluding the men, and ends up captured by a rogue zeppelin that tears a train apart. Great scene.

But the man in charge of this is none other than Ray's father Eddie, who was terribly burned and is now part machin. Eddie, who is still working for the Foundation, is in charge of the powerful Steam Tower and all the war inventions inside. Now Ray's loyalties are divided, as his father and grandfather battle in a war that has no clear "right" or "wrong" -- but which may wreck London, then the world.

"Memories" takes on three stories at once: "Magnetic Rose," a sci-fi story about a freighter who is called to a seemingly defunct space station. Unfortunately, it's actually quite active -- ruled by an A.I. who was imprinted from an unhappy opera singer, and is full of beautiful, bewildering unreality.

"Stink Bomb" is far more amusing -- a young man goes to work with a case of flu, and takes some pills. The problem is, they change his body chemistry so that he has lethally bad B.O. The clueless main character finds the equally clueless military trying to stop him as he goes out and about with his horrible stink. And there's a sort of dark "Metropolis"-style story in "Cannon Fodder," with a fog-shrouded city bristling with cannons.

Given how much work went into these movies, people would expect a masterpiece. While neither one will change the face of anime, they're prime examples -- layered, sensitively made, with intricate philosophical questions that are raised, and left up to the viewer to understand.

In "Steamboy," Katsuhiro Ôtomo explores different ideas about how technology should be used, and makes sure that there is no true villain since both Eddie and Lloyd have good intentions, though one believes in peace through power, and the other knows that power corrupts. And "Memories" contains the linking theme of remembering, whether it's one's own manipulation of memory, or the memory of mortality.

And the animation is amazingly detailed, so you can see every puff of steam and smear of grease, every shadow and ripple of fabric. No big watery eyes here. It makes the action scenes -- including a zeppelin and train almost smashing into Victoria Station -- all the more compelling. And it gives the eerie dreamscapes and dark foggy cities a shocking reality.

But every movie has a flaw, and these are no exceptions. "Steamboy's" is that the last fourth is bloated. It's too slow and meandering, and has too many lingering shots of the bulbous tower over London. And "Memories" has a rather dour finale, as well as a thinner plotline for "Stink Bomb."

"Steamboy/Memories" brings together two solid, sometimes brilliant examples of modern anime -- a steampunk epic, and three haunting, disparate stories created by masters. Definitely must-sees.