Japanese anime, set in Victorian England, where for a change the Japanese animators are relieved of their onerous duty to draw ethnic-unspecific characters, sometimes practically extraterrestrial characters, with inverted-pyramid heads, doll's eyes, and check-mark mouths. These recognizable human beings, by contrast, are Englishmen (voiced by the likes of Alfred Molina, Patrick Stewart, Anna Paquin), and no bones about it. The retro s-f story of fantastic inventions in that setting, and of the misapplication of them for military might, will naturally and necessarily conjure up Jules Verne, one of the founding fathers, who launched his career as a writer of science fiction (or in other words, launched the genre) almost simultaneously with the date of the story, 1866. Further, that conjuration will not be dispelled by the utterance of so decorous an oath as "Blast it!" This is unmistakably a kiddie cartoon, or at any rate a cartoon suitable for kiddies, and yet it's a kiddie cartoon with no condescension. Which means, among other things, no pandering to pre-schoolers and no alienating of older nostalgists. The graphic style, replete with imaginative detail and painstaking draftsmanship, would best be described as realistic comic-book; and in truth the animation is only marginally more fluid. But if the movement within the images leaves something to be desired, the movement between them — the exciting juxtapositions, the tight-knit logic, the urgent tempo — proves authentically cinematic. The action, perilously close to nonstop, is invariably large and constantly growing (by the end, as big as Godzilla and its kin), yet somehow this sort of thing seems less wasteful and more plausible when it isn't live-action. When it isn't, let's say, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Wild Wild West, to pick examples from a nearby period. Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd