Avis Metacritic

A wild elaboration. If you have never seen a Japanese anime, start here. If you love them, Metropolis proves you are right.

By the time the explosive finale arrives (with a wistful Ray Charles crooning over shots of cataclysmic destruction, no less), you'll be hard pressed to name a recent film with this much action, pathos, and smarts.

Poetic, surreal, and curiously powerful.

May not have the most sophisticated narrative, but it is one of the most spectacular and masterly demonstrations of animation in screen history.

They should have produced this in 3D for IMAX as Metropolis is the kind of work destined to blow the minds of stoners everywhere.

This muscular anime melodrama is so visually splendid that on that level alone it qualifies as a breakthrough.

Technologically, the film is impressive, and it readily overwhelms the senses with frenetic computer-generated activity, an apocalyptic grand finale, and a bombastic jazz score. But unlike its classic predecessor, it doesn't leave much in its wake but ringing ears and unanswered questions.

A hallucinatory tour de force of color, perspective and scale, virtually encapsulates the history of Japanese animation.

The look is utterly faithful to Tezuka's aesthetic -- he loved classic Disney animation, especially "Bambi" (1942) -- but it's hard to empathize with the angst of a character who looks like a Super Mario Brother.

The dialogue is dubbed into English by generic actors, whose phony, emotionless rendition undermines what's on the screen.