TohoThere's a stunning moment in Metropolis where the titular city explodes in the most glorious color you can imagine while "I Can’t Stop Loving You" plays at full blast — Ray Charles' performance of the crooner classic doesn't seem like a natural match with the action and yet it's an oddly perfect fit as the story of a boy detective, potentially world-ending conspiracy, and anime robot girl comes to its spectacular conclusion.If you're thinking "Hmm, very little of this sounds like it belongs in a silent film from 1927," you're correct. While Fritz Lang's Metropolis is perhaps the seminal sci-fi film whose legacy can still be felt more than a century after its release, a different Metropolis turns 25 years old today. This Metropolis, an anime film loosely adapting a manga of the same name by Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka (which itself was an extremely loose adaptation of the original movie), is a jazzy, beautifully strange movie. It's at once totally unlike the silent film and a fitting counterpart.It's not quite accurate to call the 2001 anime a remake of the 1927 movie. When Tezuka published the manga in 1949, he claimed that he had never seen the film, only a single image of the iconic robot (the Maschinenmensch) in a magazine. The resulting comic has some similarities with the ostensible source material in that it's about a futuristic mega-city and features a robot who adopts a female form, but while the German Expressionist film is all about labor and class, the manga is about the creation of an artificial human and an outlandish, very sci-fi plot to destroy the world. The movie, written by Akira writer-director Katsuhiro Otomo and helmed by mononymic director Rintaro, streamlines and alters a lot of the manga while incorporating more aspects of the silent film. Even so, they're quite different.Lang's Metropolis follows the privileged son of the dystopian city's elite as he undergoes a class awakening and attempts to uplift the workers. His father, the city master, wants to thwart this effort and cuts a deal with a mad inventor, Rotwang, whose robotic creation impersonates the beloved leader of the workers and undermines the cause. However, Rotwang has an agenda of his own.Many of the same elements can be found in the anime, just drastically altered or added to. It's still a plutocratic dystopia, but this time there's more than one robot. Robot workers are commonplace, much to the frustration of the city's underclass who have been driven out of work, though it's not as if the robots are treated humanely, either. Duke Red, the wealthiest and therefore most powerful person in Metropolis, has a paramilitary organization called the Maruks that hunts down and summarily executes rogue robots. His ambitions are greater than that, though. He has covertly created a superweapon that will allow him to control the world, and he's enlisted mad scientist and international criminal Dr. Laughton to create the most advanced artificial being ever — a substitute daughter to replace his actual dead child and who can sit on the throne of Metropolis in his stead. Duke Red's neglected, adopted son Red, the leader Marduks, resents this would-be replacement child. Meanwhile, a Japanese detective and his nephew Kenichi have traveled to Metropolis to try to apprehend Dr. Laughton. A confrontation after the activation of the robot, Tima, leads to her getting lost in the depths of the city along with Kenichi. Amnesiac with no memory of her true nature or purpose, Tima and Kenichi make their way through the city while various plots — including a would-be political coup and an uprising of human workers — come to a head.The anime Metropolis is full of ideas, perhaps more than it necessarily pulls off. Power struggles, industrialization, globalization, parent-child relationships, the nature of humanity… It's a lot. At times the metaphors threaten to trip over themselves — especially the robots, who are sympathetically painted as an abused underclass alongside the out-of-work humans even as they're also oppositional to them. From a certain perspective, this makes sense; elites benefit when there's infighting below them. Yet especially now, as A.I. threatens to decimate labor, it's harder to empathize with the robots than it was a quarter-century ago. In the silent Metropolis, the only robot was a tool that literally replaced workers and acted against their interests. The century-old film feels a bit more relevant on this front than the quarter-century-old title.The silent film’s Maschinenmensch, who isn’t exactly an anime heroine. | ParufametEven with some muddled execution, the ideas in Metropolis are thought-provoking. It's also visually astounding. The characters have different body shapes, sizes, and exaggerated features — trademarks of Tezuka's signature artistic style rather than the more-uniform anime faces that you see in most modern anime. They inhabit a richly illustrated world with layers upon layers of details that make the scale and depth of this impossibly large city come to life. The traditional animation is augmented by computer-generated imagery, and while CGI in the early '00s is always something of a risk, it's executed almost perfectly here. The innate uncanniness of the CGI is a feature, not a bug, and the same artistic technique that allows for these intricate, towering structures to be rendered also makes them feel artificial in a fitting way. The warm, cartoony Tezuka-style characters don't belong in a place like this, and that contrast never stops being engaging. The aesthetics add to this clash, too, as this Japanese anime about a futuristic international city borrows heavily from the West and 1920s America, especially the New Orleans jazz-inspired score. That climax, set to Ray Charles, is another perfectly dissonant wonder.For various reasons — some inherent to the nature of the film's evolution and some deliberate choices — the anime Metropolis is a louder, more colorful, and messier film than the silent original. And yet it functions well as a technicolor fever-dream continuation of Lang's German Expressionism, with all of its rich shadows. The anime hasn't really escaped from the silent film's shadow, as things would have it. It's not currently streaming or rentable and doesn't enjoy nearly the same widespread acclaim or reputation as Akira or something like Spirited Away, the latter of which was released the same year. That's understandable to some extent. It's an imperfect, knottier, and less-accessible film. (That it ends with the spectacular destruction of a tower and had a limited release in the United States in January 2002, not too long after 9/11, might be a small factor too.) Still, Metropolis is more than deserving of a second — or first — look, if for no reason other than it's fascinating to see what kinds of stories can be found inside of science-fiction's ultimate city.Metropolis is not officially streaming or rentable anywhere at the moment, but in the meantime you can find the full movie on Vimeo (dubbed) and Dailymotion (subtitled).