He deteriorates by film’s end into a type of John the Baptist character: wild-eyed, half-naked, wild-haired, railing against his son who he says is using the “devil’s handiwork to kill men by the thousands.” Intriguingly, he is shown in the closing credits superimposed on a cross, and then dissolving so that the cross is superimposed on him. Loyd also represents a satirical commentary on the patronizing governments of the ruling class that the revolutions of 1848 were directed against. The juxtaposition of amusement park rides and images of carousel horses, with the destruction caused by the Steam Castle at the end of the movie, is a commentary on the grotesque synthesis of war as entertainment (or, Christians might justifiably counter, entertainment as war). His contribution, mocked by his son Eddy, is the amusement park whose apparatus projects from the Steam Castle (a self-conscious replication of Lucas’ Death Star) in the same way the cannons do. Loyd, the grandfather (voice by Patrick Stewart), wants to use the great power of the steamball to entertain the masses.
The primary characters represent different strains of ideologies.
For a Japanese citizen born in the wake of the twin horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, technology unleashed without moral control is a living monster that devours not only lives and cities, but the souls of its caretakers, as when Loyd accuses his son of being “a fool who sold his scientist’s soul to the capitalists.”
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Supporting this interpretation are the images of London at the end of the movie which seem like mushroom clouds blossoming in London’s center. The implicit comparison is to uranium, since the steamball looks like a miniature reactor. In this instance, the substance is pure water from subterranean caves in Iceland. The weapon of mass destruction is light enough for a child to hold but powerful enough to destroy buildings: the 19 th century’s equivalent of a briefcase bomb. The invention at the heart of the movie’s allegory is the “steamball” which compresses within a sealed, steel chamber a substance taken from underground. It is in this approximate time period that Otomo sets his parable about unbridled power in the hands of “arrogant and self-interested” powers.
Those disasters prompted a human-wave emigration to the United States from both of those countries. Additionally, the 1840s witnessed massive crop failures such as the Great Potato Famine in Ireland which killed an estimated four million of the country’s eight million inhabitants, and the crop failures in Germany. The problem with this mythology is that Europe was in a revolutionary turmoil at this time due to what Marx called its “internal contradictions.” France was trying to take over parts of Italy England was trying to prevent the German states from uniting, and, except for England, Russia, and Belgium, revolutionary movements erupted everywhere. The subsequent arms race destroys the international, U.N.-type harmony that the London Exhibition represents. The premise of the movie is that the American military-industrial complex, represented by a pubescent character named Scarlett O’Hara, seeks to make money from selling weapons in Europe. The action of “Steamboy” takes place in Victorian England in 1866, but the movie derives some of its political inspiration from the European revolutions of 1848, as well as from the current international animosity against the United States. But what about everyone else? What message does “Steamboy” communicate as a film to the unsuspecting viewer? At least they knew they would be seeing an anti-American movie and anti-Christian movie. 11 and the war in Iraq had a big impact as social phenomena, and they may have influenced the film somewhat.” In a silly season of sci-fi/action films in which David Koeppe, the writer for “War of the Worlds”, claims he conceived of the Martians as the American military, and George Lucas implied that the Emperor and the Empire are Bush and 9/11-inspired, Otomo’s comment is refreshingly helpful for the fraction of one percent of filmgoers who bothered to research the film before seeing it. According to an interview with “Steamboy” director Katsuhiro Otomo in “Dark Horizons”, Otomo admits that “The terror attack on Sept.
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