And oh boy you can see that. Large-scale views of London, with tons of people, details of the fictional machines, and, especially, the steam - everything is done perfectly, creating an amazing world that instantly swallows you in its depths of this future-in-the-past scenario.
The story of goes back to the 19th century England, when steam still was the main source of power. One day, a young child Ray Steam, working as a maintenance boy in a factory, receives a package with an ingenious device called "steamball", born in an experiment of his grandfather, Lloyd Steam, and his father, Edward Steam. Just after that, mysterious people appear at the front of his door, and they insist on handing them over the device. But Ray has inherited the inventor genes of his ancestors, and it is not an easy task for the villains to get him...
The character design is great, from the mad scientist family of Steams, desperate in their ways, but still kind to their offspring, down to the colorful and proud upper-class girl Scarlett, holding herself for extremely important, but still not egoistic in any way. I especially enjoyed seeing, how Scarlett's naively stark pride makes her fully forget her fear. There were moments, where I would have fainted, if I were her (I can't handle the heights, but there were more).
All in all, this is a professional artwork, which immediately became a must-see classic on my list. As expected after 9 years of production with a budget of over 20 million dollars. The only thing, that dragged my enjoyment down to 9 and the overall mark with it, are the pitch-dark action scenes, in which I hardly saw anything and could only hear something happening. But I guess this could have been caused by the poor quality of the transmission, the sound was very low too, so I had to max out the volume.
And don't turn it off right when the credits begin to show up. The background images represent an epilogue to the story, and each picture has much more in it, than it could seem at first. They masterfully fill in the lack of character development, which is a problem movies are usually doomed to suffer from, in comparison with anime series.
