Steamboy

is a 2004 Japanese animated film, produced by Sunrise, and directed and co-written by Katsuhiro Otomo, his second major anime release, following Akira. The film was released in Japan on July 17, 2004. With an initial production cost of $26,000,000, Steamboy is the most expensive full length Japanese animated movie made to date. Additionally, the film was in production for ten years and utilized more than 180,000 drawings and 440 CG cuts. keeping with the steampunk subgenre of science fiction, the movie employs alternate history: it is set in a 19th-century context, yet it features several geopolitical and industrial circumstances that developed differently or at a different pace, sometimes as a result of advanced technological paradigms that were accomplished via the science already present in the 19th century. As evidenced by one of the early production sketches, Steamboy was envisioned as an amalgam between a Scientific Romance (à la Frank Reade and Tom Swift); a swashbuckling... full article at wikipedia