Based on the manga by legendary Osamu Tezuka, written by Katsuhiro Otomo and directed by Rintaro, Metropolis (English title: Robotic Angel) combines traditional, paper-based animation with a digital workflow, employing this duality to express ongoing conflicts between humanity and technological progress. In the futuristic city of Metropolis, humans and robots coexist, but live in well-defined spaces. The poster presents the establishing shot for Zone-1, the first underground level.

Metropolis was produced by the founder of the Madhouse animation studio, Masao Maruyama, who also produced films by the talented director Satoshi Kon. It features art by some of the finest artists in Tokyo’s anime industry. The screenplay was written by Katsuhiro Otomo, who has acknowledged his admiration for Tezuka’s work. When Tezuka began writing Metropolis, he had not seen Lang’s movie, but was inspired by a magazine article about the silent classic to imagine what life would be like in a city of the future (Clements & McCarthy 2015, p. 528). This is the main reason why his story is only loosely inspired by Lang’s original film – in many ways, the latter’s influence seems to be stronger in Otomo’s AKIRA (1988) than in this production, despite the fact that the two films have the same title.

Shuichi Kusamori, the art director, conceived of the higher city – the realm of humans – as a largely rectangular and polygonal world, which could therefore be easily produced with 3D software. The preliminary sketches and layouts for this region were devised by Takashi Watabe, and were drawn with pencil on paper and subsequently worked out digitally. The lower part of the city is the realm of robots, a counter-world to the surface, and is softer and more organic in both its ambience and the quality of its surfaces. Kusamori took charge of these designs himself, executing the final production backgrounds in considerable detail. During this production, Kusamori developed the digital skills that he would later employ to great acclaim on Innocence (personal interview, June 2019).

Print type: lithograph (offset print)
Paper: Magno Volume 200 gsm