defrog | ASTRO BOY: THE AWKWARD TEENAGE YEARS

Saw this a couple of weekends ago but never got around to writing it up. And that’s obviously why yr all here. So let’s talk about:

Astro Boy

Even before I bought the ticket, I had a bad feeling about this, primarily because I thought Astro Boy looked awfully old in the poster. But I thought, well maybe that’s just bad poster art.

Turns out it’s not, and that’s the biggest problem with this version of Astro Boy: they deliberately made him older (which creator Osamu Tezuka objected to) strictly to make him appeal to the middle-school demographic, which I gather they had to do because you can’t get an all-ages rating when the main character is essentially built to replace the dead son of a scientist driven mad by grief.

That said, credit to the writers for at least keeping that part of the story. Also, while the overall story is simplistic and borderline schmaltzy at times, well, so was the original comic. Doesn’t mean it works as a 90-minute film, though.

It’s not all bad, mind. Some of the battle scenes are really good. But too much of Astro Boy looks like it’s trying to throw in elements from other CG movies and making it relevant to today’s kids – which may or may not work for the kids, but if you grew up with Astro Boy as a cartoon icon ... well, you know that video of Watchmen as a Saturday morning cartoon? It’s like that. Only not funny.

More than human,

This is dF