I was at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in July of 2010, and the restored* Metropolis was one of the showpieces; I had never seen it, and it was WONDERFUL.

And when you go to that film festival (as I hope all of you will, it's AMAZING), they always have a themed slide show of title cards and stills before each film. And before Metropolis, they had a history of SF films and of the making of Metropolis.

And one of the slides was for this movie.

I was intrigued. Evidently Osamu Tezuka, the legendary creator of so much well-known manga, had made a manga series loosely based on Metropolis in the mid 1940s...and in 2001, this anime, based on Tezuka's series, was made.

Except for the different levels in the society, and the robot/human clash, there is very little that carries over; this is mostly a new story; it's still about the privileged vs. the unprivileged, but it's more of a noir-ish detective story.

But you really want to rent this and watch it. On the biggest screen you can find. Because this is a BREATHTAKING example of beautiful animation. The backgrounds, the details, the colors, the visual elegance of this movie will take your breath away.

I watched it with Ottersis and Scrabbleguy, and we gasped out loud several times, just because the animation was so stunning. And we all enjoyed it very much.

*It was cut from 2 1/2 hours to 90 minutes a few months after it was released, and the extra hour of footage has been lost for 80 years. Bits were found here and there, but the last chunk of it was discovered in Argentina. Here is the story of the restoration from the Kino website. You can buy the restored version as well, it's called the "Complete Metropolis".