There's a stunning moment in Metropolis where the titular city explodes in the most glorious color you can imagine while "I Can’t Stop Loving You" plays at full blast — Ray Charles' performance of the crooner classic doesn't seem like a natural match with the action and yet it's an oddly perfect fit as the story of a boy detective, potentially world-ending conspiracy, and anime robot girl comes to its spectacular conclusion.
If you're thinking "Hmm, very little of this sounds like it belongs in a silent film from 1927," you're correct. While Fritz Lang's Metropolis is perhaps the seminal sci-fi film whose legacy can still be felt more than a century after its release, a different Metropolis turns 25 years old today. This Metropolis, an anime film loosely adapting a manga of the same name by Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka (which itself was an extremely loose adaptation of the original movie), is a jazzy, beautifully strange movie. It's at once totally unlike the silent film and a fitting counterpart.
