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the Metropolis anime is NOT completely different from the manga. I have the manga and I have read it, which I infact did before watching the movie. That said there were really only a few omittions from the movie:

* in the manga Tima had a different name and was able to change genders via a button on the back of her/his throat. Technically in the manga Tima isn't really a robot but he/she is basically portrayed as such.

* there is a subplot that imo makes the manga go crazy (in a good way) with alot of seemingly unrelated events pertaining to how Tima was created. Atleast one of these events would have been impossible to do in the movie since the event featured Mickey Mouses . Obviously the Metropolis crew would have gotten sued if Mickey showed up in the movie.

The whole thing with Tima running amok is in the manga, and imo that's the main and most important plotline to the story.

Originally posted by OsamuTezuka@May 17 2005, 11:21 AM
the Metropolis anime is NOT completely different from the manga.

I don't know. I honestly think if you read one and watch the other under different titles you wouldn't immediately recognize them as the same stories. Afterall they have a somewhat different cast of characters, completely different moods, very different plot twists (the movie seems to take more from Next World at times...) and look pretty different too.

Certainly there is a connection between the manga and the film, but in the world of good adaptations, Star Wars is a better adaptation of Hidden Fortresss than Metropolis (the film) is of Metropolis (the manga). Again, I'm not putting into question the quality of the film, I just don't feel it is particularly Tezuka-ish.

More than any single adaptation, I feel like the movie just took a lot of Tezuka's ideas and threw them together to make a film.

I think it was a very good adaptation of the manga. It's said that movies based on books are NEVER exactly like the books they're based on. Some are pretty close, some are almost completely different. In the case of Metropolis I think the only character that was truely changed was Tima. Yes some of them (Mustashio in particular) are drawn differently, but if you look at the various Tezuka animes featuring Mustachio, (Astroboy, Kimba, Metropolis, etc) he's drawn differently in each one. I think looking for Tezuka's characters to look exactly the same in every work they appear in is asking a bit much, especially in the animes. Every artist draws characters differently. Look at the many different ways various artists have drawn Peter Parker and company in the Spider-Man comics.

I've gotten news yesterday from a specific website saying Adult Swim was going to show Metropolis on the 21st at Midnight, but the tv listings didn't say they were showing it.
Although, they are going to show the first Inuyasha movie at Midnight on Saturday.
I hope I stay awake for this! ^_^

I saw it yesterday. I found a striking similarity in the symbols with a very old anime called "the king and the bird". However I couldn't find any documentation on it on the Internet so far, not even a Wikipedia article.
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The 2 of them use the same symbols of a insanely huge industrious complex tower-shaped, with several high and underground levels, ultimately crumbling under its own power. At the end, the master of the complex is destroyed by his own creation. Many details such as the general atmosphere and some subplots are similar.
No I'm not calling to a rip-off in one way or the other, as generally there are many differences that clearly make them distincts works For example in "the king and the bird", there is no notion of intelligent robots or independant artificial intelligence, nor is there any struggle between humans and robots.
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I will try to see if there is any documentation somewhere, otherwise I think I will create an article on the Wikipedia, "the king and the bird" deserves such a place If there are people interested, I think I have it somewhere on a VHS, however it is in French.