Astro Boy

Both newcomers to Astro Boy and existing-fans will likely be left cold by this soulless adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s classic comic.
With a story more-or-less borrowed from the comic, grieving scientist Dr. Tenma re-creates a robot version of this dead son, Toby. Realising too late that a robot can never replace his biological child, he casts the robot boy out from the idyllic floating island, Metro city, to the trash heaps of the Earth below.
Renamed Astro Boy, the robot seeks companionship among the denizens of Earth’s surface, trying to come to terms with his robot nature in a human world and looking for somewhere to call home.
Condensing the epic adventures of Astro Boy down to a 90-minute movie was always going to be a problem. Between the 1950s comic and the two TV series, released in the 1960s and 1980s, there’s a huge amount of material to draw on.
Although most of the main players from the comics are name-checked, some only bear a passing resemblance to the original versions. Dr Tenma lacks the mania of earlier adaptations (particularly the 1960s version), Toby is maddeningly precocious, and Astro himself has a weird, gurning smile that is sort of creepy.
While the filmmakers do a creditable job of getting a more-or-less recognizable Astro Boy on screen, the oddball whimsy that characterized Tezuka’s work is replaced by a hokey story that creaks under the weight of a series of emotionally heavy scenes.
In fact, a slow and melancholy first act — which ends with the death of a child, however sanitised — might make this adaptation difficult for younger children. Not by upsetting them. Probably just boring them to tears.
From Nicholas Cage’s (Dr Tenma) depressed monotone to Freddy Highmore’s (Astroboy) the voice actors sound tired and bored. Either that or horribly miscast, like Samuel L. Jackson’s voicing of the friendly robot Zog.
The flatness of the film makes you wonder what it would have been like if the original director, the anarchically brilliant Genndy Tartakovsky (Samurai Jack, Dexter’s Laboratory), had stayed at the helm instead of passing it to David Bowers.

Astroboy has some nonsense about a blue (good) and red (evil) power source for robots, a tedious, poorly realised romance with a Brat doll look-a-like, and a couple of well-paced action sequences that might hold the kid’s attention for a minute or too.
But there’s just nothing to bring it all together, and nothing to make you care.

By: Brian Herron

Here’s the trailer: