Steamboy

Movie review by Charles Cassady Jr., Common Sense Media
Steamboy Poster Image

Common Sense says

age 13+

Animated film is too violent for younger kids.

PG-13 2005 126 minutes
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Parents say

age 10+

Based on 3 reviews

Kids say

age 12+

Based on 8 reviews

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A Lot or a Little?

The parents' guide to what's in this movie.

What Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this movie is not for younger kids. It's very violent, with lots of destruction and a father trying to kill his son. It shows a society being transformed by scientific leaps in steam power. You might talk with teens about how electricity and now computers have done the same, and whether some humanity has been lost along the way. You might also take the opportunity to do some research into real-life wonders of the Great Exhibition, like the Crystal Palace.

Community Reviews

T J.
T J. Adult
November 17, 2018
age 10+
connielove93
connielove93 Adult
November 2, 2011
age 10+

Steam on the Rise!

Beautiful movie about the role of science in war. Steamboy is breathtakingly detailed and ambitious beyond anything I have ever seen in the realm of animation!! I woud put it in the category of Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle. I am very critical of movies and their content and I would say the storyline and characters are good and well-developed. Some say otherwise, but the renowned Spirited Away has almost a non-existant plotline, it's purpose was for entertainment. This is true for Steamboy also, the plot is not as fantastic as it could be but it is obvious the creators took their time during the nine-year drawing and computer-generating process. This has become an instant classic in our household as it will be in yours.

This title has:

Great messages
Great role models
Too much violence
See all 3 parent reviews

What's the Story?

Set in 1866 in England, STEAMBOY centers on Ray Steam (voiced by Anna Paquin), the resourceful teen son in a family of inventors, but he hasn't seen his father Edward (voiced by Alfred Molina) or his grandfather Lloyd (voiced by Patrick Stewart) since they left to invent the Steam Ball, a small metal sphere of ultra-compressed liquid so mighty it could run a city. The Steam Ball arrives in the mail and Ray is told to protect it no matter what. Right away, a gang tries to take the Steam Ball. They're allied with Edward Steam, who was badly wounded in a lab accident but has rebuilt himself as a sort of cyborg. The same mishap has left Ray's grandfather Lloyd wildly opposed to technology, and the raving old man gets locked in the bowels of the Steam Castle, the family's fortress-style display at London's Great Exhibition that needs the Steam Ball to work. Ray is torn between his grandfather, who tries to sabotage the Steam Castle at every opportunity and his father, who wants to create more and more machines. The Steam Castle is a showcase for new weapons, offered for sale to the nations of the world. Edward thinks this is a good thing; Lloyd does not, and neither do the authorities and rival inventors, who launch an attack. London turns into a battleground and each side unleashes wilder and wilder engines of destruction (throughout, however, human casualties remain extremely low).

Is It Any Good?

Reportedly the most expensive Japanese-animated cartoon yet made, Steamboy takes place in Charles Dickens' time but is as full of incredible gadgets as any science-fiction epic. This retro-futurist Victorian action movie is like Jules Verne on steroids, with wondrous Industrial-Revolution machinery grown to Tokyo-stomping heights and visually realized by star animator Katsuhiro Otomo. His sci-fi epic Akira, back in 1989, opened the floodgates for Japanese animation in US theaters. Earlier it had been restricted to home-video imports, syndicated TV, and bootlegs. Akira's sprawling cityscapes and intrigues deserved the biggest screens it could get. But Akira was also dark, violent, and pessimistic.

Steamboy is similarly visionary but a little more family-friendly. It's a pretty noisy spectacle, but you can lose yourself in Otomo's sumptuous designs, cathedrals of gears, cogs, screws, flywheels, and pulleys. And this is a too-rare case in movie science-fiction where the special effects make a viewer think, about the onslaught of technology, about where human progress is going, and where it's been.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about the benefits and negatives of technology. How do they compare? Families can also discuss the potential dangers of technology. Can you think of some real-life events in which these dangers were evident?

Movie Details

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