This sophisticated and symphonic Japanese cartoon leaves significant traces of itself in the viewer. The viewer strives to find (if there would be any need to do so) an authority submerged by the force of the original story by Osamu Tezuka, by the existentialist metaphysic of Katsushiro Otomo and Rin Taro’s post-modern vision. And the traces all bring to the past despite the sci-fi appearance.

“Metropolis” by Rin Taro is comparable to Lang’s “Metropolis”. Lang was inspired by XIX century sci-fi literature; on the other hand this animated masterpiece of Japanese art is completely structured inside the XX century. In fact “Metropolis” seems to reconstruct some kind of visionary vision, almost as a summary of how people thought of themselves in “the century of cinema”, with its good sides and its drawbacks. Like trying to represent the concept of a “vertical city”, a concept that belongs completely to theXX century.

The research of a point of view tries to tell the verticality of a view in the XX century city. It’s the limit and a magnificently human of "Metropolis", human because it attempts the impossible: defy the rules of physics. Because cinema is horizontal, and the cinematography in “Metropolis” focuses on the panoramical images, but it interrupts its self by inserting a vertical point of view, it forces you to continuously look up and down, a it like the last Peter Gabriel video clip where a man falls from a skyscraper and falls through the earth, into space…

“Metropolis” is a gift to the past century to its horrors, to its fears but also to its hoe, illusions. A century of dictatorships, democracies, wars, horrors and grand inventions for humanity. But also a definitive century, in its capability of affirming the mass automobile and nuclear weapons as potential and real weapons of auto destruction of the planet. Even if his cartoon was inspired to Lang’s “Metropolis”, it is no coincidence Osamu Tezuka wrote his cartoon in 1949, the year of the first soviet nuclear warhead, the beginning of the Cold War. Because, maybe, it is there that the 1900’s are born. The 1900’s where so dense in substance and history we could make them worth double.

“Metropolis” by Taro Rin tells the story of an android, unaware of her nature (somewhat like the replicant in Blade Runner), who fuses American music and melodies with a classic of “manga culture”, up to that liberatory explosion, described through a magnificent Ray Charles song, “I Can’t Stop Loving You”. “Metropolis” juxtaposes images and sounds, broken by long instances of silence where we lose ourselves in the future city’s alleys. (The city is ever so explicitly retro) with a declaration so theoretic: In the new millennium sci-fi (like Klee the angel, who flied forward but looking behind) will look to the past: the future has already happened!

Traduzione a cura di Giuliano Capogrossi Colognesi