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Updated Friday, October 23, 2009 9:25 am TWN, By Susannah Rosenblatt, Special to The China Post

Astro Boy 原子小金剛

There's a whole lotta whiz-bang in “Astro Boy,” a slick CGI interpretation of the 1950s manga classic, but even Astro's shiny red rocket boots can't lift this conventional superhero story into orbit. The film, directed by animation veteran David Bowers, is the origin story of Astro, a powerful teenage robot with deeply human heart who wrestles with his identity, battling evil machines along the way. The movie is based on the beloved Japanese anime series created by the godfather of the form, Osamu Tezuka.

Narrator Charlize Theron introduces us to futuristic Metro City, a cotton-candy colored utopia floating high above the dingy, ravaged Earth, where helpful, efficient robots make humans' lives better. This is home to Dr. Tenma, voiced earnestly by Nicholas Cage, the genius head of the Ministry of Science, and his brilliant but mischievous son, Toby (Freddie Highmore).

But when an experiment goes horribly wrong and Toby is killed, the devastated Dr. Tenma desperately builds a robot replica of his son. Programmed with Toby's memories uploaded from a strand of the boy's hair, the robot looks just like the cocksure teenager. Soon, however, Dr. Tenma realizes his souped-up copy isn't the real thing and tells the boy to scram.

And so Toby, longing Pinocchio-style to be a real boy, embarks on a lonely search for his place in the world. Landing in the robot graveyard that now covers the Earth's surface (a visual echo of the deserted junk piles of “WALL-E”), Toby is dubbed Astro by a trio of ragamuffin revolutionary robots. His closest friend is the sassy, purple-haired Cora (voiced with entertaining sass by Kristen Bell), part of a gaggle of smart-mouthed urchins who believe he's a kid like them. Well, you know, a flying kid with headlights for eyes and machine guns hidden in his butt.

Highmore, who's played a string of major children's roles, does a fine job as the adolescent Astro. While on Earth, Astro must fight for survival (Nathan Lane stands out as the deliciously devious Ham Egg) and eventually for the future of Metro City.

“Astro Boy” introduces the big ideas that made Tezuka's work timeless, verging on profound — identity, humanity, tolerance and love — but doesn't get very far. Instead, the story is bogged down by heavy-handed political overtones, as good “blue” energy, touted by the environmentally minded Dr. Elefun (Bill Nighy) clashes with evil “red” energy, favored by the war-mongering, power-hungry General Stone (a gleeful, growling Donald Sutherland). Stone, a shoot-first, ask-questions-later kind of guy out to get Astro dismisses a political opponent as a “damn, dirty hippie,” the kind of obvious, overly broad writing found throughout the film.

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	Toby, longing Pinocchio-style to be a real boy, embarks on a lonely search for his place in the world. “Astro Boy” introduces the big ideas that made Tezuka's work timeless, verging on profound — identity, humanity, tolerance and love — but doesn't get very far. (Courtesy of VieVision Pictures) Enlarge Photo


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