Boy inventor Ray Steam holds his family's latest contraption, the steam ball, key in his battle to protect London in the Victorian Age-set anime Steamboy.

The ramshackle robot heroes and retro Robot City home of co-directors Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha's popular cartoon comedy, Robots, share an inventive look with Japanese animator Katsuhiro Otomo's rousing anime adventure, Steamboy. Both films create an antiquated future landscape of gears and pistons inspired by Jules Verne and Georges Méliès -- a retro look radically different from the typically sleek science fiction movie.

But unlike Robots, which Wedge and Saldanha stuff with nonstop slapstick gags, as if its boy-in-the-city story could never hold a child's attention alone, Steamboy is a clever, fast-paced adventure worthy of an Allan Quartermain paperback (the version playing U.S. theaters is dubbed with voices of well-known actors including Anna Paquin).

Victorian England is the colorful setting for Steamboy, and Otomo takes full creative advantage of the dawning industrial revolution landscape as a source for new, magical machines.

Like Alan Moore's graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or its recent movie adaptation, Steamboy is inspired by 19th-century fictional adventures, although with an added twist. Author Robert Louis Stevenson (the creator of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) becomes a Victorian Age hero in Steamboy, an aid to the film's boy adventurer.

Young Ray Steam (voice of Anna Paquin) and his father and grandfather are inventors looking to create the perfect and most powerful steam imaginable. The arrival of a mysterious steam ball, one of his family's incredible inventions, as well as the sudden appearance of his grandfather, disrupts the quiet life Ray shares with his mother and siblings in Manchester, England.

A group of mysterious men armed with fantastic steam-powered machines follow close behind his grandfather, intent on taking the steam ball away. But Ray is a true-blue hero, thanks to his intellect as well as his physical skills. He leaps on one of his own contraptions, a steam-driven unicycle, tucks the small steam ball into his shirt and begins the race of his life. From that moment on, Steamboy never lets up.

The screenplay by Sadayuki Murai and Otomo is full of wit and clever historical references. As Ray's adventure leads him to London, a precocious young girl named Scarlett O'Hara (voice of Manami Konishi) joins his cause. Together, they battle armored soldiers, warplanes, tanks and other elaborate steam-powered weapons. Theirs is a battle to save England and, of course, the fate of the rest of the civilized world. The one good joke at the center of the film is this: British soldiers have to keep London's destruction from Queen Victoria.

The themes and character types are familiar in Steamboy. A mad scientist is at the center of the destruction, and Ray and his grandfather share a fear of the super machines they helped create. Once an automaton army advances through the narrow London streets, Otomo piles one eye-popping effect after another into a climactic battle at London's Great Exhibition that rages for close to an hour.

Steamboy is as imaginative as any recent anime feature and more child-friendly than most. Its standout flaw is that animation supervisor Tatsuya Tomaru frequently makes the film too dark and gloomy. Tomaru clearly aims to capture the feel of a steam engine's insides, its turbines and tubing. Yet, whenever Ray ventures into the bellies of the monster machines and the screen turns sooty, Steamboy loses its footing, its sense of wonder. Basically, it's hard to remain excited when you have to struggle to see what's happening.

Murai and Otomo never give Ray a true villain to battle. For them, Steamboy has loftier battles -- the tug-of-war between the classes, between the bourgeois and the workingmen, between man and machine.

Steamboy takes place before World War I, but it's clear that Otomo has World War II's atomic bomb in mind when he speaks of machines with unchecked power. The creation of artificial life led to a social revolution in Metropolis and the creation of the war machines in Steamboy leads to the people demanding peace.

Otomo started producing comics in 1973 (including the epic series, Akira) before moving into animated films, which explains his skills with the cartoon genre. (He also co-directed Metropolis with animator Rintaro, so he understands how to design an antique version of the future.)

With Steamboy, Otomo proves himself to be the most inventive of the Japanese anime filmmakers, a worthy peer to the great Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away), another film artist whose fantasy stories match the inventive graphics of his movies.

The catch for any successful anime is to take advantage of its setting, and Otomo does that with Steamboy. Like Robots, the most popular movie out right now, Steamboy is impossible to watch without being dazzled by its beauty. But there is worthy adventure behind the visuals, a true story, refreshingly free of the cartoon slapstick that bogs down most American animated features. For a change, it's great to watch a cartoon feature and be wowed without being pummeled with gags. Grade: B