Review: 'Astro Boy'
Plot: A robot boy, created by a grieving scientist in the image of his dead son, embraces his destiny to become a hero.
Bottom line: "Astro" boys and girls will be very, very young audiences. Boomers beware.
Cast: Voices of Freddie Highmore, Nicolas Cage, Donald Sutherland, Bill Nighy, Kristen Bell, Nathan Lane, Samuel L. Jackson
Length: 1:34
'Astro Boy' soars in Japan, but not here
Photo credit: MCT/Handout | Astro Boy tests his powers in the new animated feature from Summit Entertainment and Imagi Studios, "Astro Boy."
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Scenes from 'Astro Boy'
Appropriately, perhaps, there's something robotic about "Astro Boy," the computer-animated feature based on the 1960s Japanese series that was the first anime on U.S. TV. Creator Osamu Tezuka's streamlined, saucer-eyed vision drew in baby boomers with its off-kilter quality and the rat-a-tat dialogue of English vocal artists dubbing at Japanese-language pace. Astro Boy himself - an android Pinocchio - proved enticing: What would it be like to be a kid robot? Cool!
But "Astro Boy" the movie is strictly for small fry. The fleshy, foamy CGI makes characters look like plush toys - there's no attempt at the anime aesthetic - giving scenes that should feel exhilarating, like Astro Boy (voiced by Freddie Highmore) learning that he can fly, all the impact of a soft landing.
Following the surprisingly harrowing death of scientist Dr. Tenma's son Toby, Tenma (Nicolas Cage) builds a robot replica replete with memories. After Tenma rapidly disowns him, robot Toby, chased by the villainous President Stone (Donald Sutherland), falls from the floating Metro City to the garbage-strewn ghetto of the surface world. There, the Fagin-like Hamegg (Nathan Lane) and a group of orphans take him in. A comic subplot with the Three Stooges-like Robert Revolutionary Front gives him the new name Astro.
Cage's voice work as Tenma is all tossed-off flatness, and while Bill Nighy gives care and humanity to colleague Dr. Elefun, even he can't save such dead-weight lines as "Everyone has their destiny." Sutherland's ignorant, warmongering president is a plodding caricature, not helped by the hammered-home symbolism of "blue core" / "red core" positive and negative energy sources. At least the animators got rid of the long eyelashes that made the original Astro look creepily like Betty Boop.
