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Theatrical Review: Astro Boy

Astro Boy from IMAGI and director David Bowers is the latest take on Osamu Tezuka’s classic character and it’s first time out as an all computer animated feature. The basic origin for the character is that brilliant scientist Dr. Tenma loses his son Toby in a tragic accident, and using his skills in robotics, re-makes his son as the world’s most perfect robot, only still to reject him in the end, but the little robot still manages to find his place in the world, thanks to other friends. Tezuka produced thousands of pages of material around the character and there’s been three prior animated series (all worth seeking out) and it’s just fun stuff, primarily made for the younger reader/viewer in mind, but still appealing to this older one as well.

This new movie takes a lot of liberties with the details of Tezuka’s original, obviously with the idea in mind to make it more palatable to an audience today (and one would figure also to remove some of the cruelty inflicted on the character in those early stories) and while I don’t think all of these choices were necessary, in the end, I do think it’s basically in the same spirit as what Tezuka has done. Will that still make it something that people and their children in particular will want to see? Well, that’s pretty hard to say, especially considering that this character has been out of the limelight for quite awhile.

Before seeing this though, I’ve actually been reading some of Tezuka’s original stories and have been watching some of the cartoons from both 1980 and 2003. While I don’t consider myself an expert on the character by any means, I still managed to see a lot of similarities in this new production with what’s been done before and on top of that, I just plain like all of this stuff and really like the sense of wonder about it all. But for some who are really familiar with this, well, it’s kind of hard for me to say how they might take some of the more drastic changes (particularly around the setting, around Dr. Tenma, who gets a major overhaul here, and Astro’s overall “age”).

The animation is really nice and though it’s inevitably going to be compared to the gold standard (i.e. Pixar), I think what IMAGI has done here is quite well done with some real nice set pieces and some nice subtleties here and there.

There’s a pretty stellar voice cast at work here too, headed up by Freddie Highmore as Astro and Nicolas Cage as Tenma, and also including Kristen Bell, Bill Nighy, Donald Sutherland and Nathan Lane amongst others, and overall, I think it’s pretty well done, with no real missteps.

I had a real good time with this and hope it does well enough to see more in the future- Tezuka’s got tons and tons of ideas that would make for some great ideas for future installments – but I have my doubts that this will continue, at least in this form. I have no doubts that there will be other versions of the character to come eventually, but will this more Americanized version stand the test, it’s hard to say…

By Darren Goodhart

Darren Goodhart is a 44-year old St. Louis-based Graphic Designer and Illustrator (and former comic book artist) who's been seeing movies all his life, but on an almost weekly basis in theatres for the last 20 years and owns nearly 1,000 DVDs for his home theatre. He's learned a lot about film over the 20 year period, and has taken his appreciation beyond the mainstream. His favorite types of film are mostly genre entertainment, but he also enjoys a wide range of drama, action and cult-y stuff from around the world, and is currently re-discovering a love affair with lower budget exploitation and genre films from the 70s and early 80s. He doesn't try to just dismiss any film, but if there's a bias against one, he'll certainly tell you that in the space of his reviews.

0 replies on “Theatrical Review: Astro Boy”

Holden and I just got back from seeing Astroboy. I knew the character had manga roots, but really didn’t know anything else about the character. It just didn’t happen to be in my collection, so I went into this completely cold.

We both thoroughly enjoyed the film. I was a bit surprised by some of it, but in the end I think it was a great “Hero’s Journey” kinda story that really did a lot to capture the imagination of my 7 year old. His dad had a blast both watching the movie and the gleam in his son’s eye as ‘Astro’ started to discover who he truly was.

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