For a big screen, CGI-heavy adaptation of one of the most beloved animated characters of all time, do you get the feeling there is very little buzz about David Bower’s Astro Boy?
The Australian distributor has opened it with only four New South Wales school holiday trading days to go before the tykes head back to the exam-crammed third term; there are no 'happy meal’ tie-ins with a certain family-friendly Scottish restaurant chain, nor are the leading toy retailers’ shelves stacked with merchandise.
And what of the star tours that routinely accompany animated features perceived to be potential blockbusters? Lately we’ve had: Cameron Diaz and Jeffery Katzenberg for Shrek 3, Seth Rogen and his director Conrad Vernon for Monsters Vs Aliens"¦ it didn’t happen for Astro Boy. It’s all rather odd, given the headline-friendly potency of a cast list that includes Nicholas Cage, Kristin Bell, Samuel L. Jackson, Charlize Theron, Donald Sutherland, Bill Nighy and Finding Neverland’s Freddy Highmore as 'Astro’.
The absence of promotion is all the more surprising because the film’s actually an ambitious and satisfying take on the mythology of a generation’s favourite TV superheroes. Against the backdrop of some spectacular visions, the story of a grieving father’s gift to his lifeless son packs an emotional wallop in the film’s opening scenes, though it drops the ball in the thrilling but more conventional third act.
The film constructs a divided future: the gleaming, floating cityscape of Metro City and the garbage tip for humanity otherwise known as Earth. We are introduced to Toby (Freddy Highmore) in a school class room, where his incredible intelligence makes him a target for his jealous classmates. He has inherited his smarts from his father, Dr Tenma (Nicholas Cage) who, with his faithful offsider Dr. Elephant (Bill Nighy), is the leading scientific adviser to the ruthless President Stone (Donald Sutherland). An experiment to harness the immense power of 'blue/red’ energy goes horrible wrong and Tenma is robbed of his beloved and promising young son.
Unable to deal with the loss, Tenma reconstructs the child as a robot-boy, so that the child can enjoy a long life in the cyborg-dependent future. These are the film’s best scenes, and recall such classic tales as Pinocchio and, oddly, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as more contemporary fables such as Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001) and Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987). The boy/robot experiences the raw emotion of a real human, but struggles existentially, unsure of who (or what) he truly is. If the depth of the conundrum is lost on younger audiences, the surface tension in these scenes won’t be. Astro’s plight is played out to very moving impact by Bowers and co-screenwriter Timothy Harris - the scenes of Dr Tenma rejecting Astro, and the boy’s banishment to the desolate trash-can that is Earth, are superbly staged and deeply affecting.
At the halfway point the drama ebbs and the storytellers make some questionable decisions. Amongst the mountainous piles of discarded robots (many still kicking with desperation as their batteries die, in a scene perhaps too scary for the real littlies), live a band of nomadic children, led by scrap-metal robot-technician Hamegg (Nathan Lane). The film pays homage to Dicken’s 'Oliver Twist’ in these sequences, with Hamegg as Fagan, Astro as the orphan with his own secret, the gangleader Cora (Kristen Bell) as a reverse-gender take on The Artful Dodger. But the dialogue and references are pure-2009 SoCal-speak, and such unnecessary pandering to the US teenage market undermines the integrity of the film.
By Act 3, Bower’s Astro Boy morphs into the traditional action hero; leading the teens in a revolt against Hamegg, he finds his own strengths to return to Metro City on his terms and ultimately saves the day/planet/etc. The rich animation, with its beautifully rendered surfaces and sublime patina, is forsaken for a more palatable action model – still gorgeous, but distractingly-reminiscent of Brad Bird’s The Incredibles (2004) or the aforementioned Monsters Vs Aliens (2009). The requisite life lessons that American animated films seem determined to incorporate at all costs, comes across as hammy and obvious, as if the film is catching up with what the audience already knows. The introduction of a final-frame alien bad guy is either a nod to appease the fans of the TV series (I’m not one) and/or sequel-bait. Whatever the reasons for its inclusion, the ploy doesn’t work.
Nevertheless, Astro Boy is a winner, and it is a shame that this honourable reimagining of the classic Osama Tezuka comic series should not be afforded the mega-marketing push that far inferior animated efforts enjoy. Early feedback from hardcore Astro-cultists has been mixed, but as a stand-alone project the film delivers on levels we had no right to expect it to.
