Fritz Lang’s dark, dystopic vision of the future reimagined as a Japanese anime film? Yes, and it’s not at all bad. Based on Osama Tezuku’s 1949 manga, the story has drooping-moustached detective Shinsaku Ban (Kousei Tomita) and his assistant Ken-ichi (Kei Kobayashi) arriving in Metropolis in search of Dr. Laughton (Junpei Takiguchi) and his latest creation, Tima (Yuka Imoto). They find, as in the 1927 film, a disjunction between the humans up above, where President Boon (Masaru Ikeda) is engaged in a power struggle with Duke Red (Taro Ishida), and the laboring robots down below in a Dantean Inferno of Zones. Dr. Laughton checks out early, but Tima becomes the focus of everyone’s efforts as it becomes clear that she’s the part-human/part-robot key to animating the just-constructed Tower of Babel–like ziggurat. She hooks up with Ken-ichi and the two of them try to elude Duke Red’s "son," Rock (Kohki Okada), and find Shunsaku Ban. But the real question is, will Ken-ichi be able to animate Tima?

Directed by Rintaro, the film is a dizzying riff on the original Metropolis and numerous other movies. It begins with a quote — "Every epoch dreams its successor" — from Jules Michelet and clouds rushing by a figure on a Lord of the Rings–like tower. There are allusions to Japanese painters, iris wipes, Ray Charles singing "I Can’t Stop Loving You," and a red radio in the snow that conjures the sled from another cinematic classic. More than I could take in at one viewing, it had me wondering whether all its animated finery amounts to much more than the emperor’s new clothes. Yet as Chris Fujiwara writes in his review of the current Harvard Film Archive Fritz Lang retrospective, Lang gives his characters the chance "to avoid fitting into designed spaces, to move unpredictably, to protest the excess of order." That’s true of this Metropolis as well.