Although he may not be familiar to U.S. audiences, Astro Boy is no newcomer to the animated universe. Engineered for young Japanese audiences in the 1950’s by manga artist Osamu Tezuka, the mechanical moppet has long been a cultural icon in his native country; think Mickey Mouse with electronic innards. Drawn like a hybrid of Bob’s Big Boy and Namor the Submariner, Astro was a hero with the extraordinary qualities of mythic supermen wrapped in a kid-shaped shell. Now he shows up again, on American shores, in a bright and bold animated film by David Bowers (Flushed Away) that stays true to its source material while offering both children and their parents a welcome reprieve from the recent run of tepid children’s cartoons.
Metro City is a flying megalopolis that thrives in luxury while the polluted Earth below it languishes in poverty. The key to the city’s prosperity is robots. Developed by the famed Dr. Tenma (Nicolas Cage as another brilliant scientist?), these robots dutifully serve the human population without question. The inhabitants of Metro City happily give the automatons credit for their peace and prosperity, exclaiming cheerfully ‘rust in peace’ as they dump the discarded husks to the ground below.
Astro Boy opens with an educational film strip that helpfully explains that bit about the city and the robots and introduces the audience to Toby (Freddie Highmore), Tenma’s prodigy son. Being precocious and anxious for his dad’s company, Toby sneaks into a test of blue and red energies. Tenma and another scientist (Bill Nighy) believe the positive blue energy can be used to heal the decimated surface world but the opportunistic President Stone wants to develop a military weapon with the negative red. Before the film can go too mystical on us, the red energy causes the dangerous Peace Keeper robot (looking like the Iron Giant’s ornery cousin) to run amok. In a tragic moment, it accidentally kills Toby.
Yes parents, that’s right. Less than ten minutes into this family film, the child protagonist is literally vaporized. To be fair, it doesn’t happen onscreen and the trauma of the event is downplayed, but this rather dark plot thread remains. Tenma, in his grief and guilt, builds an identical robotic duplicate that possesses the memories, attributes and emotional attachments of his dead son, including some extras; thrusters spring from the soles of his feet, his arms transform into cannons, and in an upgrade I don’t recall from childhood, he has machine guns in his butt. Unfortunately, like his fairy-tale counterpart, Pinocchio, Astro eventually finds himself far from his home and beyond the safe confines of Metro City. Chased by Stone’s goons and rejected by his father/creator, he lands on Earth where he meets a colorful bunch of castoffs both robotic and human.
Lest I chase curious families off from the film, let me point out that Astro Boy is not a dark fearsome affair or a mopey drama chastising parents who don’t get their kids. Astro may not be Toby, but he has all of the boy’s thoughts and feelings and just as he marvels at his newfound abilities he struggles to find the place where he belongs. As a plot device, this gives Tenma the opportunity to truly love the son he has for the person he is. And in Astro, the film has a central figure that walks in both circles of the social caste system—artificial and biological—and finds curious ways to unite them. Kids, on the other hand, won’t be worrying about any of that because they will be transfixed by the movie’s generous sense of energy and wonder. When Astro realizes for the first time that he can fly, the animators send him soaring through majestic cloudscapes and the bustling airways of a night-drenched city. The action scenes are often thrilling without being scary and the final battle between Astro and a robotic nemesis that absorbs the matter around him is suitably show-stopping.
What separates Astro Boy from previous adaptations of the material and from similar, recent films like Meet the Robinsons and Robots is its distinguished visual design. This is an unconventional but beautiful piece of animation. Everything from the shiny, retro towers of Metro City to the pastoral, post-apocalyptic and dingy Earth arena is displayed in eye-catching detail that never wanders too far into realism. Taking a page from Tezuka’s manga, the characters have a soft, childlike exaggeration to them. Bowers complements the comic-strip atmosphere with a warm, pastel color scheme that evokes those long ago covers of Popular Science featuring the flying cars. Later, when Astro and gang find a discarded robotic Goliath in the forest, I was reminded of the work of Hayo Miyazaki. Enriching the film’s dizzying world is a rather large voice cast featuring the talents of Donald Sutherland, Nathan Lane, Kristen Bell and Charlize Theron. The combination is effective and I was surprised by how lively it all is.
There is little here to really warn about, although it becomes obvious early on that Astro Boy cannot sustain all the questions and complex scenarios that it raises. A different film would have pursued the troubling notion that Toby really is gone and that Astro is simply a construct that thinks he should love the man he calls father. This version is a fancy wind-up toy that spins a familiar story about a boy with super powers trying to figure out how he fits in. At the end of the day, all of the odd mystical bits and routine chase scenes aside, the most compelling quality of Astro is that, after all, he is just a boy.
