Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Astro Boy Blu-ray Movie Review

Too artificial to thrive, too kid-friendly to die...

Reviewed by Kenneth Brown March 23, 2010

For all those who aren't familiar with God of Manga Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy -- the seminal anime icon whose 1952-68 manga series and subsequent 1963 television series introduced the world to Japanese comics and animation -- allow me to shed a tear. "Astro Boy," through its many variations, captured my imagination as a child. Granted, I wasn't tackling phonics or flipping on the TV on Saturday mornings until Reagan was running the White House, but even a spawn of the '80s like myself was well acquainted with Tezuka's expressive robot and his at-times cold Ministry of Science creator, Dr. Tenma. It's for that very reason that I approached Imagi Studios' CG-animated adaptation, Astro Boy, with such high hopes. But as an unapologetic fan of TMNT, it never occurred to me that Imagi might come up short. I fell in love with their charming character designs, grinned every time I watched the film's trailer with my son, and felt an enormous surge of nostalgia whenever a commercial would hit the airwaves. Alas, as the end result limped along, listless voice acting and all, I found myself growing more and more dissatisfied with Astro's latest adventure. For me, its only saving grace was plastered all over my son's face.

Far below Metro City's silver towers is a world of dilapidated beauty...

To save Metro City from certain doom, 30th century scientists created a series of devices that lifted the entire city into the skies high above the Earth. But nearly a hundred years later, the Beacon of the Clouds merely perpetuates the planet's pollution problem, dumping an enormous amount of trash on the surface below. It only gets worse when Metro City's militaristic president (voiced by Donald Sutherland), determined to improve his poll numbers, orders his Ministry of Science director, Dr. Tenma (Nicholas Cage), to insert a dangerous power core into a war machine dubbed the Peacekeeper. Unfortunately, nothing goes as the president plans, the Peacekeeper turns its weapons on its handlers, and Tenma's son, Toby (Finding Neverland's Freddie Highmore), is killed in the chaos (a potentially frightening scene the animators handle especially well). Distraught and determined, the doctor desperately builds a robot that's identical to his son and uses a sample of Toby's DNA to give the machine the boy's memories and personality. Inserting an equally powerful but positively charged power source into the bot's chest, Tenma is overjoyed to have his son back. At least for a time. As grief takes hold, the boy is rejected by his father and, after an ensuing attack ordered by the president, plummets to the surface of the Earth. There, Toby encounters a band of mechanical rebels (the three of whom, in one of the film's all-too-rare moments of comic genius, offer a thinly veiled homage to The Life of Brian), begins referring to himself Astro, and finds a new home with a ragtag bunch of orphans (chief among them Kristen Bell) led by a pleasant caretaker named Ham Egg (Nathan Lane).

Battles erupt, blasters are fired, buildings are toppled, red-n-blue/positive-and-negative mumbo jumbo is hurled about with abandon, and rocket boots take Astro to heights unknown. So how is it that Astro Boy falls so flat? It essentially begins with writer/director David Bowers and co-writer Timothy Harris' screenplay and ends with the film's voice cast. Simply put, the majority of the actors are asleep at the mic. There are a few highlights -- Highmore is enthusiastic (albeit a tad grating and one-dimensional), Lane is a bubbly treat, and Bill Nighy delivers fantastically syncopated work (even if he's terribly underutilized) -- but the others haven't been taught the fine art of channeling an entire performance through the mouth. Pixar has long coached its performers to exaggerate their every word and even their physical movements; to load the sum total of their characters into their voices and launch it out of whatever cannon they can muster. But it's clear from the outset of Imagi's Astro adaptation that Bowers neglected to explain the fundamentals to Cage, Sutherland, Bell, and their distinguished colleagues. Cage is an actor who naturally emotes with his face and hands, but the animators struggle to capture his refined subtleties. Sutherland ruffles up his own feathers, but never exudes the sort of mad-hatter villainy the film's third act requires. Bell dips into her bag of snarky tricks, but can't quite grab hold of the innate ferocity that made Veronica Mars such a spicy delight.

Not that it often matters. Bowers and Harris catapult from one plot thread to the next, one emotion to another, one overwrought development to one bout of murky exposition, all to the detriment of the characters and the story. When Tenma tells his newly awakened son that he's taking him out of school, Toby simply shrugs his shoulders and chirps, "sounds good, dad." When Toby overhears his father telling a fellow scientist to get rid of him, he strikes an unsettled pose but never actually gets very upset. When Tenma decides to deactivate Astro at the president's behest, he suddenly changes his mind with next to no explanation. Sadly, it gets much worse. Toby barely blinks after learning he's a robot, adjusts to his new life on the surface in a heartbeat, cozies up to a new father without dealing with Tenma's rejection, swears he won't fight then casually decimates a horde of aggressors, defends robot rights then forgets to really acknowledge the cause... the list is a lengthy one. Don't get me wrong, the filmmakers' jarring connect-the-dots routine never ruins Astro Boy -- if anything, they afford their characters too many opportunities to explain their feelings and psychological motivations rather than allowing the animators to show them -- but it does dull the film considerably.

Will your children notice? Would they even care if they did? Not at all. As flawed as its script may be, as ordinary as its dialogue is, as hollow as an adult may judge many of its heroes and villains' emotions, Astro Boy is still an action-packed, blast laden, I've-got-machine-guns-in-my-butt adventure bound to entertain the kiddies. Even I found myself warming up to its wares whenever Astro would trash an advancing bot, rocket across the skies, or risk his life to save Metro City from a lumbering Peacekeeper. It may have required a serious Pixar-style tune-up to appeal to nostalgic thirty-somethings like myself, but my son has asked to watch it again and again (providing I agree to, in his words, "fast forward through the boring parts in the beginning"). My advice? Give it a rent and give it a spin. At the very least, your children will be ecstatic.

Astro Boy Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

If nothing else, Astro Boy rockets onto Blu-ray with an exceptionally sharp and vivid 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer. Colors are bold and beautiful, infusing the open skies with dazzling blues and rich purples, the steely skyscrapers of Metro City with warm pastels, and the unkempt surface of the Earth with rich browns and lush greens. Moreover, primaries pack some serious red-core punch, black levels are direct-from-the-digital-tap perfect, and contrast is impeccable. Fine detail is just as outstanding. From the towering scrap heaps Astro encounters when he first reaches Earth to the dusty colosseum where he fights a rust-buckled lineup of increasingly deadly bots, the film's textures, edges, and backgrounds are simply gorgeous. Even when Imagi's animation comes up a bit short, the technical presentation stands its ground. Artifacting, noise, and ringing never enter the fray, and the picture remains clean and clear throughout. The only thing that holds Summit's transfer back from perfection is some slightly noticeable (and admittedly minor) banding and aliasing. While neither issue comes close to hindering the overall impact of the image (well, beyond the Metro City skies and Tenma's unwieldy hair), both caught my eye on a few too many occasions to escape mention. Ah well. Negligible nitpicks aside, animation enthusiasts and Astro Boy fans from any generation will be thrilled with the high-flying results.

Astro Boy Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Summit's sprightly DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track is just as invigorating, even if it only proves its true mettle when Imagi's gun-toting bots go bolt to bolt. Dialogue, human and machine alike, is teeming with warm voices and crisp clanks, granting whispers, cries, and shouts equal life. Rear speaker activity is a tad restrained here and there, favoring John Ottman's score over environmental ambience, but Astro's spirited tussles and Stone's attacks fill the entire soundfield, enveloping anyone in earshot with wind-whipped fly-bys, sparking battle blades, searing energy blasts, transforming opponents, toppling buildings, and shattering windows. Similarly, LFE output reigns in its support on occasion, but only by design. Otherwise, explosions rip up the floor, machine guns rattle the walls, and the whir of charging generators overwhelm the rest of the soundscape. All the while, directionality scatters bits of metal from one speaker to the next, pans are as nimble as Astro's cloud-hopping, and dynamics keep his adventures lively and fierce. Paired with the disc's striking video transfer, Astro Boy's lossless mix completes Summit's impressive AV presentation.

Astro Boy Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

With just over half-an-hour of special features, most of which are aimed squarely at the kiddies, the Blu-ray edition of Astro Boy doesn't have much to offer. The video content is all presented in high definition, but little else sets this meager package apart from the crowd.

• Inside the Recording Booth (HD, 10 minutes): Meet the Astro Boy voice actors, hear their thoughts on the original characters and the film, and watch them deliver their performances in the recording booth.
• Designing a Hero (HD, 11 minutes): Character Designer Luis Grane teaches young viewers how to draw Astro Boy before explaining how his team used computers to color and animate the characters, the tech, and the various environments and locales that appear in the film.
• Building Metro City (HD, 8 minutes): Freddie Highmore introduces the animators, designers, and modelers who created Metro City, Dr. Tenma's penthouse, and other locations.
• Getting the Astro Boy Look (HD, 3 minutes): Hey kids! Watch as a group of young fans get their hair styled with power spikes before learning how to do the same at home. Ugh.
• Astro Vs. The Junkyard Pirates (HD, 4 minutes): More a deleted scene than a bonus short, this action-oriented scene should have been kept in the film.
• The RRF In: The New Recruit (HD, 1 minute): The RRF recruit a new member (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson).
• Creating a Global Icon (HD, 5 minutes): An image gallery set to selections from John Ottman's rousing score.

Astro Boy Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Far from the blazing, smartly penned adventure I was expecting, Astro Boy's bot-vs-bot battles, simplistic themes, and accessible young hero should still appeal to kids everywhere. I know my son couldn't take his eyes off the screen. Thankfully, Summit's Blu-ray release has more to offer. Though its supplemental package is a complete disappointment, its video transfer brushes close to perfection and its DTS-HD Master Audio track is quite impressive. Flawed as the film itself might be, Astro Boy will nevertheless earn your children's affection and spend some quality time in your family's Blu-ray player.