Speaking of steam, it should naturally be associated with the steam revolution. This is the first industrial revolution. The corresponding year in Europe is the second half of the 19th century.
The meaning of steampunk includes two parts. Steam: In the background of the technological level of the first industrial revolution, the age of the steam-powered technology explosion. Because of the liberation of ideas and the promotion of technology, various civilian scientists spend their energy on the interpretation of bizarre theories and strange inventions. Punk: a generalized cultural style that integrates claims of music, clothing, and personal consciousness opinion. Birth of a young group of young people born after World War II, They use extreme thinking and actions to counter society, anti-humanity, and no-civilization and declare their existence. So, the two seemingly unapproachable concepts of steam and punk put together a fanciful universe. The information technology that should have been born in the future has seen a leap forward in the era of steam. Both in the past and in the future, we miss the great industrial era of the British Empire and escape from the real world.
This art form began with the science fiction William Gibson “Difference Machine”. In the end, it gained endless vitality in movies and novels.
Typical steampunk movies include “Mad Max” series and Hayao Miyazaki “Howl’s Moving Castle,” both of which are already in mainstream vision. In a standard steampunk works, there is usually an inventor that exceeds the average level of the times, misty cities, intelligent animals, even machinery, and buildings. “Avril and the Fictitious World” is set in a steam-punk universe.
This is a “future works” full of imagination and implied meaning. In that era, Paris has two Eiffel Towers, people and animals can talk. The resources are too scarce, oil stains all over the land, the green is rare, and the number of secret police is less than the number of good people.
The film was produced for six years and created a determined girl born in a scientist family and an ever-young cat that influences the story. She is courageous and smart. She does not have the qualities that girls should have. She is not even beautiful. Her greatest persistence is to continue the family’s invention career.
In 1870, Napoleon III secretly visited scientist Gustav Franklin on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War and asked if he had studied the mysterious potion that could be allowed French soldiers to have an immortal body. Unfortunately, Franklin research was not successful, but it had a wonderful side effect: Let the animals have human intelligence.
Napoleon was so angry that he wanted to fire around and kill two talking lizards, but it caused an explosion. Napoleon and scientists were burned to death and the lizard escaped. In 1931 before the Second World War, Franklin son, Pops, and grandson Paul and granddaughter Annette (Avril parents) evaded the government’s hunt and continued the old Franklin study: the ultimate serum. It was also at this time that the famous scientists in the human world were bizarrely missing. They all turn out to be taken away to develop weapons of war for the Empire. The Franklin family escaped the government’s hunt but did not escape the capture of a mysterious dark cloud. In the chaos, the grandfather fled, and the whereabouts of Paul couple were unknown.
Avril and that can talking cat all be hiding in the huge bronze statue of Napoleon in the center of Paris, still, do not give up the ultimate serum research. The family reunited again after many years of coincidence, but the place was an underground world that humans could not imagine. In the underground world, the two giant lizards that had escaped in the past kidnapped many top scientists and established a completely different green world from the ground. Here, scientists and lizards live in with peace and play music together. Most importantly, they thought that they not only evaded the high-pressure rule and pollution of on the ground but also have the hope to spread the green and create a living hope for all living things. At the end of the game, the lizards swallowed the “ultimate serum” and caused the rocket to destroy the human world. In his view, animals rule the human society will not make the world’s disaster serious.
The last earth, of course, was not destroyed, and the earth has progressed into a new era: Age of electricity. Perhaps in many Hollywood movies, there are many kinds of possibilities for the complete collapse of human technology. But there was not have like this ending have French romantic and crazy structure at the same time.
