Word: tenma
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...this year in Moon and Surrogates. Plus the literal underclass and upper-class strata of WALL•E. And not to forget the bereft father, twisted by family tragedy, from last week's Law Abiding Citizen. "If you lose your son like this," a fellow scientist tells Dr. Tenma, "and you don't go crazy, you're not a human being." Tenma doesn't plot the ingenious murders of everyone in Metro City, the way the father does in Law Abiding Citizen; he simply, and more plausibly, averts his heart from the child he has created, because this Toby...
...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...
...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 the Disney...
...Wallace and Gromit glory) and directed Flushed Away, that uneasy alliance of the gnome-artisans at Aardman and the brasher gang at DreamWorks. What both outfits stress is telling stories through characters, and Bowers (along with co-writer Timothy Hyde Harris) breathe a solid emotional life into Toby and Tenma, while adhering to the confines of a kid-oriented feature. The animation style is supple and assured. And if the audience includes any precocious kids like Toby, they'll be diverted by references to Isaac Asimov and Immanuel Kant...
...station, Kawamoto and the other first-year boys gathered outside and, commanded by the senior boys, jogged in formation about two kilometers to the school. They jogged across the Shin Koi Bridge over the Ota River spillway, across a slim space of land to another bridge, which spanned the Tenma River, across another strip of land and the Nishi Heiwa Bridge over the Honkawa, finally crossing the Heiwa Bridge over the Motoyasu River. About 100 meters from the school gate, Kawamoto and his classmates were ordered to halt and march regimentally the rest...