Do the Robot

Whenever discussing the history of anime, Astro Boy usually comes up. Despite its unquestionable influence, though, you find few people familiar with the title beyond the concept and maybe a few characters. I sought to fix that a few weeks ago upon finding the 2003 reboot cheap at an F.Y.E. After all, this was a particularly high-budget production that made special effort to be accessible for all nations! Does it live up to the hype?

Uh . . . sorta-ish?

To acknowledge the elephant in the room, this show is Americanized, sometimes painfully so. I can understand making sure no one dies and using only “harmless” laser guns, even if it lessens the drama in many harder-hitting stories. But the episodes themselves are so obviously cropped that it's a constant distraction. This was clearly made for TVs larger than a little box, there's clearly stuff going on at the sides we can't see, and there's nothing we can do about it. Likewise, only the English dub is available, with no way of knowing what the more direct translation would have been. I say this because at some points dialogue doesn't seem to match the facial expressions; sometimes Astro will say a snarky line but look very sad and confused while speaking. Pretty sure he didn't have a dumb catchphrase like “Let's rocket!” in Japanese, too. I'm not enough of a purist to say any and all changes ruin a show, but these changes do sometimes take you out of the story.

The story itself is quite good. While not as dark as Tezuka tended to lean, the show mainly deals with anti-discrimination commentary, with robots taking the place of insert second-class race here. Mankind's somewhat delicate relationship with technology is also touched on. While the vast mojority of episodes are stand-alone, entries featuring the Blue Knight form a loose ongoing arc as simmering social tensions boil over into a full-fledged robot revolution. Yeah, for a lighthearted kids' show, things can still get pretty real.

The characters were a highlight for me. It was pretty cool to recognize a guest character and flip through The Art of Osamu Tezuka to confirm that, yes, they had appeared in dozens of other series in various roles. Not everyone was particularly fleshed-out, mind you; I lost count of how many bad guys hate robots “just because”. But at least there was a certain charm to watching famous character designs hamming it up (perhaps ham-and-egging it up in the case of Ham Egg?) that kept things entertaining. Besides, a surprising amount of heroes, antiheroes, and even villains are given the full spectrum of morality, considering this show is squarely aimed at kids. The aforementioned Blue Knight, for instance, fights for a good cause but threatens human/robot relations by doing so. Baddies like Rock and Lamp are shown to have sympathetic backstories which explain their misdeeds, as well as potential for redemption. Even the black-clad, charismatic main villain Dr. Tenma is often portrayed as a lonely, self-destructive man who teaches Astro many important lessons.

The voice acting itself is hit-or-miss. I never quite bought the gravelly, Ash Ketchum-ish voice the clearly female actress gave Astro, and kid characters in general sound kinda dumb with the possible exception of Reno. Most one-shot and recurring characters get similarly cartoony voices, but they usually come off as more endearing than grating. Dr. Oshay's actor seems to have the most dialogue behind Astro, and delivers it well enough that I wish his character had more meat than one-note good guy exposition factory. And I found myself wondering when Dr. Tenma would come back to say something with his cool voice. The music, unfortunately, is mostly miss. They replaced the Japanese opening theme with somewhat serviceable techno music. It gets less serviceable the more often it's used in-show as battle music, which is almost every episode; I can't say for certain how many other tracks were thus replaced, but none stand out. Animation is good for the time, especially given how often the camera movies through CG environments. They say each episode had roughly three times the budget of standard anime episodes, and I can believe it, but it does feel duller and more processed than its fully hand-drawn brethren. But hey, maybe the bit they cropped on the sides looked downright spectacular!

All in all, Astro Boy was a seriously flawed show that I can forgive because it remains fairly solid and completely well-intentioned. It reflects Tezuka's heavy themes as best as it can for the wide target audience, and throws plenty of bones to the author's diehard fans despite rebooting some aspects for maximum accessibility. The Americanized changes are by far the biggest problem, especially since I don't believe any alternate version has been or will be released. Still, the version I found was ten dollars for fifty episodes, so really who am I to bitch? The 2003 reboot of Astro Boy remains a competent introduction to a much larger world, and in the end that's just what the creators intended. Don't be afraid to check it out.