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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.
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.
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.
You seem to have missed the current trend in "kids" movies. Shrek 2 had a character performing auto-fellatio. Casper had Casper excited because he had a girl in his bed. Happy Feet had the King Penguin asking the women which one was going to go first in the orgy they were about to have. Cars had a character talking about the woman's deposit load here tattoo. The list goes on and on. Any more, it isn't a question of which children's movies have inappropriate content. It's a question of which movies don't.
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.