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Astro Boy Director Speaks
An anonymous reader writes 'The director of Flushed Away, David Bowers, discusses his new Japanese manga adaptation, shares his science fiction influences and relates Astro Boy's thematic relationship to Star Wars.' I recently was reading Astro Boy manga, and I'm very hopeful that the movie won't disappoint. It looks really fantastic, but visuals in trailers certainly can lie.
The continued rape of my childhood.
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Astro Boy ran out of money and fired it's entire staff of animators at one point. The movie was finished on the cheap. I do not have high hopes for this one.
"It looks really fantastic, but visuals in trailers certainly can lie"
And no further discussion is needed
They've turned it into generic commercial fluff.
The new one is a comedic coming of age story where the little robot boy has lots of cliche catch-phrases and in the end Dr. Tenma finally realizes the worth of his estranged robot-son.
(Sorry for the spoiler.)
Don't even torrent it. It's not worth the bandwidth.
The trailer looks pretty bad. But then again, the original show was pretty bad, too.
http://www.astroboy-themovie.com/
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Can't wait to see AstroBoy (I grew up watching the cartoon), but color me surprise if it doesn't get butchered, too.
I'm not sure if I am looking forward to learning the "Astro Glide"
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I'm guessing this one doesn't have a drunken Dr. Tenma selling Astro off to the brutal robot circus. Or maybe it does, but the trailer doesn't presage such a thing. Anyone seen a sneak preview, legal or otherwise?
But, hey, now we know that Astro was "born ready". :-\
Maybe he'll be doing the kicking of the asses and the taking of the names and the chewing of the gum of the bubbles.
Woops. Sorry. Started channeling Starfire for a moment.
...it's gonna be awesome.
*Movie X* was such an influential part of my childhood. You can't just take *X* hours of a series and cram it into a movie without losing everything magical about it. There's just too much compromise moving from *medium X* to the movies. And changing *minor element X* to *minor element Y* just proves that point. This is one movie I will definitely claim not to see. The graphics look pretty good though.
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This story puts a slightly different slant on the "no money" aspect. They had bridging finance that was late in showing up, so union says that they have to shut down for the duration.
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The trailer looks pretty bad. But then again, the original show was pretty bad, too.
Having not experienced Astro Boy until the ripe old age of 25 on Adult Swim, I will defend certain aspects of the show. Namely, I found the various scientists to be interesting, inventive, original and true to science fiction in that -- at least in the handful of episodes I watched -- the often posed moral problems with their inventions. I found some of the topics almost prophetic about what we would be faced with as our technology advances. While this was nothing new to me now, these were animated from 1952 to 1968. To a lesser extent, the villains seemed to every now and then be more than one dimensional bad--a welcomed change. While I have not seen all of them, what I did see was very inventive in the mysteries and adventures of Astro Boy.
Now, that said, the worst aspect of the show was the main character. Tetsuwan Atomu ("Mighty Atom") or Astro Boy was pretty darn one dimensional. Maybe this is great for children, I got real tired of it. Never really seeming to change or evolve from episode to episode, he had a built in ability to tell what's right and wrong. Making him ridiculously infallible and lame. He also seemed to have the Batman's Utility Belt Effect enabled (I just happened to have the antidote to Iocane powder in my belt!) in the devices in his back. To me, the origin story of Astro Boy will probably be mighty boring and straightforward unless he was not created with these built in features and had to find his way. Unfortunately, the previews seem to indicate my fears.
I won't bash it until I see the movie. But that interview was short and soft-balled. It did nothing for my confidence in this movie. Simply put: his target audience is most likely kids. And that's great. And that might get him the most money. But it's not for me. The experience I strive for is not spoon fed black and white problems resolved by the tested, tried and true silver bullet. I feel sorry for movie goers interested in only replication of that plot and welcome movies like The Watchmen.
My work here is dung.
What's been more successful? Marvel adaptations or Manga? DC or Darkhorse for that matter?
mu
Calvin running around shirtless with crisco in his hair.
They can't take that away from me.
If this had been done by Hayao Miyazaki, the director of "Spirited Away", it might have been good. He does kids as lead characters very well. But Miyazaki doesn't need to do remakes. He can develop original concepts.
The director of "Flushed Away"? Much lower down the food chain.
For a good cartoon remake, see Tex Avery's Red Hot Riding Hood.
I sincerely wonder if this is the right kind of "nerd" content for slashdot. Animations are fun for about 15 seconds, but I'd rather read the stories that aren't a bunch of hollywood crap. you know, the cure for aids, space travel, super computers, human rights... Things that MATTER.
http://www.dannychoo.com/post/en/10191/Astro+Boy+Movie+Poster.html
Sorry but some of us liked watching a little boy fly around in his underwear with red gogo boots. And you f__ked it up!
No, I'm serious. Yes I really do enjoy that, and yes he supposedly wears slacks. Slacks.
And he's not shirtless, either. He wears a windbreaker.
Is because a half naked cartoon robot boy would turn us all into raving child molesters?
These guys would have adapted Wonder Woman's costume into a burkah
F__k this astro-boy movie.
see the trailer and think it was for a Mega Man movie?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Do we get to hear Astro's report and pick out the things that are wrong?
Will the Buggles song be on the soundtrack?
I wonder if, in 1987 someone playing Mega Man for the first time would have wondered if it was a video game adaption of Astro Boy?
I don't want to write this message, but I have to, because I'm an avid reader of Osamu Tezuka, because I think he's one of the greatests authors among all creative arts and because this movie adaptation, judging from the trailer, is nothing short of a blasphemy.
They didn't need to make that film, they could have come up with their own robot teen hero instead of pillaging Tezuka's ideas and sculpting them into a run-of-the-mill cartoon comedy with cool kids. This is exactly what it's going to be, you just have to hear some of the lines, the delivery or see a few of the situations to know what you're getting into. This is the killing of a Japanese icon on the altar of aseptic filmmaking and inept storytelling with all the odious cliches we've been enduring film after film in American cinema for the past 10 years or more.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's bad because it's a production from the US; I love American films, I love good American films. It's bad because Astro Boy, like any other Tezuka work, has so much personality and such a unique Japanese identity that if you stray from it, you're not only losing what makes it so special but you're trashing it. Tezuka could be grandiose and grotesque, humane and merciless, profound and foolish, all this in the few pages of a single story. This is precious, rare, a delight to read. Even if Astro Boy is the lighter side of his vast work, it still should be handled with great care and pertinence, which was obviously not the intention of the filmmakers: their goal was just to make it cool and trendy for modern audiences as to rake money, not critical praise from his fans and admirers.
Even though the story is completely different from the original manga, Metropolis (2001), a Japanese animation film, is certainly more faithful to Tezuka's style and spirit. Rin Taro and Katsuhiro Otomo (author of Akira, who wrote the script) perfectly grasped what made Tezuka's stories so inspiring and beautiful, the vulnerability and complexity of his characters behind the apparent simplicity. And they preserved the original drawing style! Yes, it was daring, but it was right. This is Tezuka, this is how his stories look and read, like it or not, but if you don't, leave them alone instead of trying to mend what you don't comprehend.
We took it to Japan and there was a little bit of reluctance on their part because it was perceived as a foreigner taking over one of their properties. But in truth, everybody who saw it loved it.
More like they were put off by the designs and character behaviors that derive relatively little real lineage from Tezuka's iconic originals, and were about as amused to watch this foreign reinterpretation as Westerners are of Engrish. They could have done a 15FPS 2D shakycam Fred Hembeck funky-kneed production and it would have received the same reaction from the Japanese, because in reality what they are thinking is "You are fucking crazy for having done what you just did, so thanks for the laughs." IOW, "at you, not with you."
See also Japanese opinion of the Robotech original sequels, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers The Movie, Dragonball Evolution, Street Fighter The Movie, Super Mario Bros., etc.
It is for this reason that I am REALLLLLLLY hoping that a Western-produced Evangelion movie eventually comes out. Not that I would actually watch it (or any of the above mentioned productions, including this Astro Boy movie); I just love it when the U.S. embarrasses itself on the world pop culture stage and actually takes pride in it.
Everything you said is true or consistent and this is why I didn't want to write a message in the first place, because it's so easy to dismiss what I said, perhaps rightfully, as the overstated ranting of the inevitable narrow-minded fanboy. I haven't even seen the movie and just basing my argument on a trailer, for Pete's sake!
In some cases, trailers tell you all you need to know, but regardless of that, what I meant by Japanese identity is that Astro as it is could not have come from a different country. Or if it did, it would have been altogether different and surely not as peculiar and charismatic; its about cultural identity and how it imprints on the artist's work. You can't deny popular culture from Japan has its own, strong personality; whenever artists from a different country try to write a story in a manga form, it never feels quite right, the dynamics are wrong and it fails to engross the reader. The filmmakers of Astro Boy seem to have turned the original characters and narratives into stereotypes of American animated movies. Just have a look at the characters they added. Why didn't they keep Tamao and Shibugaki, the clumsy kid with big glasses and the stupid bully? Because they didn't fit in THEIR vision of Astro Boy. But every bit they remove from the original is not just a detail, it's a component part of Astro Boy and a reason why people loved it.
(sorry for the typo in the title)
I had heard of Pluto before but I've never read it. There's a difference though, Naoki Urasawa isn't appropriating Tezuka's universe, it's a reinterpretation, he expands on an existing story, the drawing has nothing in common and it's not even bearing the same title. The film claims to be the Astro Boy. I wasn't outraged when Disney did The Lion King, even though it's supposed to be a rip-off of Jungle Taitei.
When a character that stands on two feet, speaks English and dresses in human clothes is put on the screen, it is no longer an "animal". It is a person. Specifically the fetish for these anthropomorphized characters are called "Furries". It amazes me how many people rationalize that if it is animated Furry Porn, that it is OK to market it to kids. If your into furry porn, that's fine, but it shouldn't be marketed directly to prepubescent children any more than any other porn, fetish or not, should be.
Even if the Hollywood retards somehow manage to not butcher this one, didn't Tezuka specifically say he didn't want anyone remaking this story? This remake is wrong even if by some miracle it doesn't suck big sweaty donkey testes.
I'm from the US, and live in Japan, spending almost exactly half my life in each place. And I simply don't agree one whit about "unique national cultural identity" claims, at least in broad general brushes. How about specifics, then, such as specific elements of this particular film? I don't know, since I haven't seen it. But how would we decide which elements belong to individual decisions, and which are due to the "different country" factor? That's's the rarely-considered fatal flaw in most "cultural difference" claims, IMO. But that's far too big a topic for a now-dead Slashdot thread. Even if I personally think such "cultural difference" claims, while fine in principle, tend to be 99% nonsense in practice, I have nothing that constitutes "proof" of this. Similarly, a claim such as "...could not have come from a different country" is opinion (of a popular sort, too), not something that can be proven. Purely a matter of dueling opinions. So be it!