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Into this crowded agora comes David Bowers' Astro Boy, an animated feature based on Osamu Tezuka's 1951 manga series that spawned a TV cartoon series from the '60s. (I confess I never saw it, because I was out doing stuff that decade.) The new version, streamlined and Americanized, but with animation from the Hong Kong company Imagi, lacks the brand recognition of the big CGI studios, but the movie has its charms. It's fun, encyclopedically derivative and pretty darned affecting. (See TIME's pictures "Animated Movies: Not Just for Kids...
...Tenma (voiced by Nicolas Cage in noble-mopey mode) is the leading scientist in Metro City, a floating utopia of the future where robots do most of the work for humans. Tenma is devoted to his son Toby (Freddie Highmore, of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), a boy genius who's also a nice kid. When Metro City's nasty mayor Stone (Donald Sutherland) insists on activating a kind of death ray, Toby wanders into the lab and is killed. His grieving father creates a robot version of Toby - same DNA, but with cool extras like propellant flames...
...itemize these elements isn't to say they can't be powerful. Maybe all stories are just one story, with the common themes of love and loss, art and adventure, death and resurrection. These are the threads from which Astro Boy weaves its coherent imaginary world. The gravity of grief carries Tenma's character through the story; the robot Toby's need to prove himself to his dad and himself turns him into a superior being, the best of both species. Ham Egg, the exploiter of children down on earth, is a little bit Fagin, a little bit Stromboli from...
...purely reasoned critique of Astro Boy would note that it does not advance the art of animation, and that some of its humor stabs miss their mark. But Bowers knows how to infuse emotion without just ladling it out in Act III; it is at the core of the story, as Astro Toby teaches his father the verities of love, heroism and family feeling. The little robot has a strong, generous heart, and so does this movie...
...words or less. As the day wears on, however, it feels as though Dieckmann piles a whole life’s worth of unfortunate events into the few hours she has. Soon enough Eliza has had a minor breakdown, a confusing interaction with a sexy younger delivery boy, and an enormous fight with her best friend. She has also saved her child’s life over the phone. The situational humor in all this tends to fall flat, and the bleak accumulation of incident after incident comes close to reducing this movie to cautionary tale—the cinematic...