Metropolis Review: Osamu Tezuka's Science Fiction Epic That Built a City to Ask One Question

Quick Take

• Tezuka's loose adaptation of Fritz Lang's 1927 film creates something entirely his own
• A child android named Mitchi holds the key to the city's future — and does not know what they are
• One of Tezuka's most ambitious early works, complete in a single volume

Who Is This Manga For?

• Readers interested in the foundations of science fiction manga
• Those who appreciate classic manga in conversation with world science fiction
• Fans of stories that use dystopia to ask genuine philosophical questions
• Anyone curious about Tezuka's range beyond Astro Boy and Black Jack

Content Warnings & Age Rating

Age Rating: T (Teen) Content Warnings: Violence, dystopian social stratification, themes of identity and consciousness, some content that reflects its 1949 era

The content is dated in places — this is a 1949 manga. Read it with that historical context.

Yu's Rating

Category	Score
Story Depth	★★★★★
Art Style	★★★★☆
Character Development	★★★★☆
Accessibility for Non-Japanese Readers	★★★★☆
Reread Value	★★★★★

Story Overview

In the stratified city of Metropolis, humans live in upper zones of privilege while robots serve in the lower levels. A mad scientist has created Mitchi — an android child with the face and form of an innocent, built to channel incredible power — and the city's political forces want to use Mitchi as a weapon.

Detective Ban Kenichi and his young nephew Kenichi travel to Metropolis to investigate a crime. They encounter Mitchi before understanding what Mitchi is. The friendship that forms — between a human child and an android child who does not know they are not human — is the series' emotional core.

The question the series asks is: if consciousness and feeling are present, does the substrate matter?

Characters

Mitchi is one of Tezuka's great character creations: genuinely childlike, curious about the world, capable of love, and facing the discovery of their own nature with a complexity that most adult characters in manga never reach.

Kenichi is the human entry point — young, idealistic, and drawn to Mitchi without knowing why. His friendship with Mitchi represents what the world could be if it did not stratify along lines of who is "natural."

The villain Duke Red wants to use Mitchi to restore an old power. His motivations are coherent even as his methods are monstrous.

Art Style

This is early Tezuka — 1949. The art style reflects the Disney and film influences of the period, with expressive characters and a visual vocabulary drawn from cinema. The panel composition is cinematic; Tezuka was thinking in cuts and angles before most manga artists were.

The city design is ambitious — a stratified vertical metropolis that shows real engagement with the Fritz Lang source material while being transformed into Tezuka's own vision.

Cultural Context

Metropolis was written in 1949, four years after the end of World War II. Japan was under occupation. The question of what humanity means, what distinguishes the human from the manufactured, what rights exist for beings that are not fully recognized — these had immediate postwar resonance.

Tezuka adapted Fritz Lang's film (which he had not actually seen — he worked from a still photograph and descriptions) into something fundamentally different. Lang's Metropolis is about class struggle. Tezuka's is about consciousness and identity.

What I Love About It

Tezuka is one of the reasons I read manga at all. He created the vocabulary of manga storytelling — the close-up, the cutaway, the panel timing — at the same moment as he was asking the deepest philosophical questions.

Metropolis asks what we owe to beings who feel, regardless of whether they were born or made. In 1949. This is a question science fiction keeps returning to, and Tezuka got there before most of the genre.

Mitchi is heartbreaking in the specific way that only genuinely innocent characters can be.

What English-Speaking Fans Say

Western readers who come to Tezuka through Astro Boy or Pluto often read Metropolis as context and find it more emotionally powerful than expected. The 1949 art style is an adjustment for readers used to contemporary manga, but the story transcends it.

The single-volume format is frequently cited as appropriate — the story is told exactly as long as it needs to be.

Memorable Scene ⚠️ Spoiler Warning

The moment when Mitchi understands what they are — not as tragedy but with something more complicated, a recognition that does not destroy the self — is the series' best passage.

Tezuka does not make this easy or clean. Mitchi's response to their own nature is one of the most thoughtful treatments of identity I have encountered in any medium.

Similar Manga

• Astro Boy — Tezuka's other android protagonist; more optimistic in register
• Pluto — Naoki Urasawa's reinterpretation of Astro Boy; asks similar questions with contemporary sophistication
• Ghost in the Shell — the question of consciousness in artificial minds, decades later
• Battle Angel Alita — identity and selfhood in a cyberpunk context

Reading Order / Where to Start

Single volume. Complete as one reading.

Official English Translation Status

VIZ Media published the English edition. Complete in one volume.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• One of the earliest and most thoughtful science fiction manga
• Mitchi is an exceptional character
• Single volume — complete story, manageable commitment
• Historically important to understand manga's development

Cons

• 1949 art style is a real adjustment
• Some dated content reflecting the era
• Loose adaptation changes what fans of the film may expect

Format Comparison

Format	Notes
Physical	VIZ single volume edition
Digital	Check availability
Omnibus	Single volume already

Where to Buy

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