The first time Astro Boy attacked United States servicemen was in 1967. Circumstances were dire, mind you; Astro had been thrown back in time from his home era of 2017, and could not find an adequate energy source to keep his body going. He'd been subsequently coerced aboard a U.S. nuclear submarine, at which time he realized he would be pressed into slavery as a living American weapon. As a result, the ostensibly peace-loving lad wound up beaching the mighty vessel and literally pounding its exterior until it exploded, acknowledging its personnel only to invite them to run.
Flying away from the mayhem, Astro then came upon a village under fire from U.S. aircraft, arriving on the scene just in time to find adults and children alike, unarmed, laying dead in the open. Vowing to protect the people from further aggression, Astro Boy then punched American bombs out of the air and stacked American tanks one on top of another, over a dozen high, to tear them all in half with his lunging fist. Noting the imminent arrival of a village baby, the little robot then ascended to the center of the bombing fleet to declare himself an Angel of Death and fire bullets from his butt at Americans, causing them to flee as he destroyed their jets.
Powerless, spent, Astro Boy then sank mentally into a dead sleep and physically into a deep river. Only one day after his fabulous rescue the village was bombed again, and everyone died, day-old baby included, a plain wartime event noteworthy only for the uncanny appearance of rising lights from the blasted ground, lights shaped like Astro Boy. America's Air Force turned away in fear, for they were confronted with the souls of the dead, perhaps, albeit shaped like a metal Japanese child in short pants with a gun muzzle for an anus.
I suppose it wasn't a terribly subtle or complicated story, that; it was part of the later incarnation of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy comics, a decade and a half running in ‘67, then appearing as a serial feature in the Sankei Shinbum newspaper.
It was more complicated, I know, when U.S. aircraft firebombed Japan's industrial sites in Osaka in mid-1945, in the final year of World War II, though I don't think it came off as very subtle on the ground, where thousands died, but 17-year old Osamu Tezuka did not.
And it isn't difficult to imagine these wartime experiences informing Tezuka's most famous creation, both in terms of
The Angel of Vietnam, the Astro Boy story mentioned above, and as a larger thing: a direct product of WWII, a pacifism-themed sci-fi boy hero manga that contrasted the still-recovering Japan of young 1950s readers' daily lives with a peaceful, bright, technologically top-of-the-line country of the 21st century, a cosmopolitan land where the new struggle would not be over sustenance or pride but robots-as-humans. Cautionary stories, told from a place nonetheless soothing in how much plain damn better it was from the real present day.
Knowing all this, it's interesting to study the middling fortune of the new computer-animated
Astro Boy movie. An international affair, produced by a Hong Kong-based animation studio (Imagi Animation) and directed by an English animation veteran (David Bowers), this latest incarnation hasn't really set American theaters on fire -- though it did break an opening weekend box office record for feature-length CG animation in China -- pulling in only $18 million over three weeks on a $65 million production budget. In terms of public visibility it seemed to vanish as soon as it arrived, quickly replaced by that creepy-looking CG version of
A Christmas Carol (and
its sexy poster), which itself may have been washed away recently by Roland Emmerich's
2012, which behaved like a proper spectacle and racked up $230 million worldwide in four days.
Astro Boy wasn't ever in danger of making that kind of money, granted, but it didn't do much to carry forth the banner of what once was
the landmark television anime back in 1963; comics never were enough for Tezuka.
That's not to say being a landmark necessarily means being loved by everyone. To hear Hayao Miyazaki talk of the old Astro Boy show (as
I've mentioned before) you'd think he was dealing with Original Sin, a high-speed low-quality precedent that damned anime to soupy prolificacy for hapless generations. Truth be told, the manga isn't nearly Tezuka's best either; it's got visibility and nostalgia and some socio-political kick behind it, but it's also a blunt, repetitive thing targeted firmly at young kids. Go leaf through Dark Horse's 23-volume comprehensive reprint project and just try and count all the times Astro is reluctantly pressed into action against his fellow robots or struggles to keep the embers of optimism stoked after some tragedy. It can be charming, sure, and in its early episodes it certainly ranks above much of the world's comics output in terms of emotional complexity, but none of that abrogates the fact that Tezuka would release considerably more sophisticated works in the future, even as popular Astro lunged warily into a darker, more political manga scene as the ‘60s wore on, resulting in awkward sequences like The ‘Nam: Mighty Atom as described above. I wonder if he ever met Frank Castle? He must have survived, since he kept on flying until 1981, the year I was born, when they started depicting Japan as scary corporate devils, intent on buying America and obviously far away from the reconstruction spurned by the Atom.
So, the funny thing about the new
Astro Boy is how much it gets
right, which means picking up Tezuka's weaknesses as well as his strengths. A lot of the manga's in-joke charm is preserved, from various
Tezuka Star System cameos (including Tezuka himself
and his lil' pig-faced critter stand-in) to tactical citation of earlier bits of its own history - some of
the ‘60s anime title sequence gets subtly remade as Astro zips around exploring his powers. The original's dour origin premise is dutifully updated, with brilliant Dr. Tenma's beloved son violently killed (sadly, Nicolas Cage restrains himself from chomping into the Dr.'s potentially livewire role) and Astro Boy created as an imperfect twin replacement, the imperfection always figuring into the work's grand theme, since robots are individuals like people are too.
Then there's weaker stuff. Some have criticized the movie's politics as shrill - the miracle power source that gives this Astro Boy life is peaceable and loving Blue power while the entirety of violence and cruelty in the world is Red, the preference of a cruel, militaristic supervillain politician. This is mostly true, but it ignores how Astro Boy's politics are
always shrill, from the vs. America skirmish summarized above to Naoki Urasawa's booming Iraq War backdrop for his own recent Astro update
Pluto; the new movie even tosses out a hapless trio of specifically Marxist robot revolutionaries, in apparent homage to Tezuka's own discomfort with the radical politics that powered some of the gekiga he found himself competing with as the Japanese comics form matured. C'mon:
Marxism jokes in a kids' movie! How can I stay upset?!
The very least effective aspects of the film are, unsurprisingly, where it diverges from Tezuka's scheme. Its particular version of the future isn't so much a gleaming funhouse mirror on today as a takeoff on the venerable proles-below, gardens-above setup of Fritz Lang's
Metropolis -- on its own a witty enough reference to Tezuka's own 1949 manga of the same title -- with a floating city shadowing a ruined Earth heaped with rusty metal garbage in enormous stacks, almost exactly as seen in the recent hit motion picture
WALL-E. Worse, Astro Boy falls to this Earth and makes friends with a bunch of mononominal spunky orphans straight out of the North American kids' movie playbook (maybe attributable to co-writer Timothy Harris, of
Kindergarten Cop and
Space Jam). There's even an uneasy pseudo-girlfriend type that gets mad at Astro Boy but then learns an important lesson about family and stuff. These concessions jar badly with the stuff of Tezuka's concept, imperfect as it may be - Astro seems a hundred times more at home in a gladiatorial robot arena forced (by reliable Tezuka heavy Hamegg, played by Nathan Lane!) to fight his own kind.
Inevitably, we have to face the absence of Tezuka himself, as with prior Astro adaptations. He was only ever truly close to the ‘60s animated series, which was actually the
third television Astro Boy, following a 1957
kami-shibai presentation of narrated drawings and a 1959-60
live-action series. It's the anime everyone remembers, for its historical achievement, sure, but also I think for the rough and ready energy hewing so close to the manga provided. Tezuka lived to see a later television adaptation, a 1980 project directed by Noboru Ishiguro (later of
The Super Dimension Fortress Macross, itself paid due homage by those clever 2009 animators as Astro confronts a brief swarm of missiles with curling smoke tails, an
Itano Circus, named for animator Ichiro Itano) with some storyboards and direction by Tezuka himself, but it wasn't so popular in Japan, as noted by Tezuka expert Frederik L. Schodt in his invaluable
The Astro Boy Essays. In case you thought the country just couldn't get enough domestic Astro-product.
Schodt has commented on the new film, by the way, in
the comments section to Manohla Dargis' review of the picture for the New York Times. "
Osamu Tezuka created Astro Boy to be an emissary of peace," he writes, "
and in this new film he continues to function as one." Schodt refers to the international nature of the production, spreading the Astro-message as wide as possible. I'll add that Bowers and company do grasp the essentially optimistic nature of Astro Boy, who melds his Blue power with the rampaging Red at the film's climax, obliterating both and leaving Our Hero stone asleep, just like back in ‘Nam. Ah, but Astro used a fragment of his Blue power to wake up a scary robot voiced by special guest cameo Samuel L. Jackson, who then uses that force, growing, to wake the Boy back up, as he's woken back from death many times in the comics. As he woke television cartoons, and the imaginations of kids in hard times. This trail of resurrection is Tezuka's optimistic legacy, even if it means the series can't stay down for long, rust and bumps and everything else.
Joe McCulloch is the fist behind Jog - The Blog. He posts to The Savage Critics, and prints with The Comics Journal, Comics Comics and Bookforum. Via fists.
The Watchman is ©2008 Joe McCulloch.
The first time Astro Boy attacked United States servicemen was in 1967. Circumstances were dire, mind you; Astro had been thrown back in time from his home era of 2017, and could not find an adequate energy source to keep his body going. He'd been subsequently coerced aboard a U.S. nuclear submarine, at which time he realized he would be pressed into slavery as a living American weapon. As a result, the ostensibly peace-loving lad wound up beaching the mighty vessel and literally pounding its exterior until it exploded, acknowledging its personnel only to invite them to run.
It was more complicated, I know, when U.S. aircraft firebombed Japan's industrial sites in Osaka in mid-1945, in the final year of World War II, though I don't think it came off as very subtle on the ground, where thousands died, but 17-year old Osamu Tezuka did not.
That's not to say being a landmark necessarily means being loved by everyone. To hear Hayao Miyazaki talk of the old Astro Boy show (as I've mentioned before) you'd think he was dealing with Original Sin, a high-speed low-quality precedent that damned anime to soupy prolificacy for hapless generations. Truth be told, the manga isn't nearly Tezuka's best either; it's got visibility and nostalgia and some socio-political kick behind it, but it's also a blunt, repetitive thing targeted firmly at young kids. Go leaf through Dark Horse's 23-volume comprehensive reprint project and just try and count all the times Astro is reluctantly pressed into action against his fellow robots or struggles to keep the embers of optimism stoked after some tragedy. It can be charming, sure, and in its early episodes it certainly ranks above much of the world's comics output in terms of emotional complexity, but none of that abrogates the fact that Tezuka would release considerably more sophisticated works in the future, even as popular Astro lunged warily into a darker, more political manga scene as the ‘60s wore on, resulting in awkward sequences like The ‘Nam: Mighty Atom as described above. I wonder if he ever met Frank Castle? He must have survived, since he kept on flying until 1981, the year I was born, when they started depicting Japan as scary corporate devils, intent on buying America and obviously far away from the reconstruction spurned by the Atom. 
Then there's weaker stuff. Some have criticized the movie's politics as shrill - the miracle power source that gives this Astro Boy life is peaceable and loving Blue power while the entirety of violence and cruelty in the world is Red, the preference of a cruel, militaristic supervillain politician. This is mostly true, but it ignores how Astro Boy's politics are always shrill, from the vs. America skirmish summarized above to Naoki Urasawa's booming Iraq War backdrop for his own recent Astro update Pluto; the new movie even tosses out a hapless trio of specifically Marxist robot revolutionaries, in apparent homage to Tezuka's own discomfort with the radical politics that powered some of the gekiga he found himself competing with as the Japanese comics form matured. C'mon: Marxism jokes in a kids' movie! How can I stay upset?!
Inevitably, we have to face the absence of Tezuka himself, as with prior Astro adaptations. He was only ever truly close to the ‘60s animated series, which was actually the third television Astro Boy, following a 1957 kami-shibai presentation of narrated drawings and a 1959-60 live-action series. It's the anime everyone remembers, for its historical achievement, sure, but also I think for the rough and ready energy hewing so close to the manga provided. Tezuka lived to see a later television adaptation, a 1980 project directed by Noboru Ishiguro (later of The Super Dimension Fortress Macross, itself paid due homage by those clever 2009 animators as Astro confronts a brief swarm of missiles with curling smoke tails, an Itano Circus, named for animator Ichiro Itano) with some storyboards and direction by Tezuka himself, but it wasn't so popular in Japan, as noted by Tezuka expert Frederik L. Schodt in his invaluable The Astro Boy Essays. In case you thought the country just couldn't get enough domestic Astro-product.
