The 2009 Manga Adaptation Astro Boy is the Confused Marxist A.I Knock-Off We Never Knew We Didn't Need
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
The epic saga of The Travolta/Cage Project and the Travolta/Cage podcast has been filled with uncanny coincidences. Even beyond Face/Off, John Travolta and Nicolas Cage’s careers have overlapped and intersected in fascinating and unexpected ways.
The Travolta/Cage Project is steadily morphing into The Cage/Cage Project because we are running out of Travolta movies to talk about and, full disclosure, the few that remain are what are known in the business as real stinkers.
So the many, many coincidences to be found in the otherwise forgettable 2009 computer animated manga adaptation Astro Boy haver nothing to do with the star of Saturday Night Fever and everything to do with Cage’s propensity for repeating himself in strange ways.
I’m about to record a podcast centering on two of Cage’s movies from the early days of the Obama administration: 2009’s Astro Boy and 2010’s Kick-Ass.
In both movies Cage plays the obsessive, insanely demanding parent of a child superhero who endures traumatic death within their family and are clearly deeply unwell.
In Kick-Ass, the obsessive, insanely demanding parent is Big Daddy, proud papa and mentor of gleefully profane killing machine Hit-Girl.
In Astro Boy, the obsessive, insanely demanding parent Cage portrays is Dr. Tenma, a bigwig at the Ministry of Science in futuristic Metro City and the father of Toby Tenma, a dead child who is reborn as super-heroic robot Astro Boy.
In the other uncanny coincidence, in the space of just a few years, Cage voiced powerful figures in two different hideously animated CGI cartoons with bizarrely overt, even ham-fisted political dimensions.
2006’s The Ant Bully was accidentally a Communist manifesto not unlike the one Karl Marx cooked up. Astro Boy is equally class-conscious in its portrayal of a futuristic dystopia where robots serve as an exploited underclass for a wealthy elite that literally occupies a different world than poor people and robots.
Astro Boy doesn’t just delve inexplicably deep into the world of class politics as it pertains to robots of the future and man-animals. It also touches upon some of the most painful, intense emotions imaginable. It’s fundamentally a story about grief and mourning that can’t begin to do justice to the exceedingly heavy themes at its complicated core.
It’s as if the filmmakers set to make a fun crowd-pleaser about a robot becoming a real boy just like A.I and forget that, actually, A.I is an incredibly creepy and depressing movie, a stone cold bummer.
That was by design. Spielberg set out to make a movie that reflected the arctic, obsessive vision of Stanley Kubrick, the filmmaker the project originated with. Astro Boy, in sharp contrast, seems confused and overwhelmed by the bleakness at its murky center.
That confusion is reflected in opening narration that puts a chipper, ironic spin on a future world where the wealthy live in Astro City, a floating consumer paradise city high above the earth, while the suffering masses, and unwanted robots, live in a glorified junkyard below.
Our hero Toby Tenma (Freddie Highmore) is one of the lucky ones until he is killed when an experimental robot his father is working on runs amok. Overcome with grief and despair, Toby’s father builds a hyper-advanced robot with Toby’s memories. He also has super powers, which is nice.
Dr. Tenma’s emotional arc calls for him to be cold and aloof as well as condescending and bigoted towards robots so that he can thaw emotionally and come to realize their value.
But the movie goes way too far and makes our hero’s creator/dad a borderline sociopath. The bootleg Dr. Frankenstein plays God and creates a being EXACTLY like his dead son but without a soul but when he behaves in a manner the not so good Doctor doesn’t understand he casts him out, informing him coldly, “I don’t want you anymore.”
Toby eventually ends up on planet Earth, where he falls in with a group of Marxist robot revolutionaries (they even have a Lenin poster in their hideout) out to overthrow their human capitalist oppressors but they’re sabotaged by the Law of Robotics, which states that robots cannot harm humans.
On Earth, Toby is re-named Astro Boy and comes to embrace being both a robot and a super-hero. The evil President wants Astro Boy destroyed but he proves resilient and a fierce fighter.
Astro Boy is a product of an unfortunate era in computer animation that was adroitly satirized in the Chip N’ Dale: Rescue Rangers movie when it was possible to animate human beings in CGI as long as you didn’t mind that they were almost invariably nightmare fuel, hideous abominations from somewhere deep in the uncanny valley.
like this.
Toby/Astro Boy is, if anything, excessively cute. He looks like a cross between Tintin and chain restaurant mascot Big Boy but he does not look like any of the other characters in the film. His character design belongs in another film, which never stops being distracting.
It could be much worse, however. Cage’s poor Dr. Tenma is a ten car pile up of bad ideas. He’s got a hideous rooster’s comb blob of hair, an endless ski slope nose and a hideous goatee/soul patch at the end of his chin.
Dr. Tenma’s kindly associate, meanwhile, bears an unfortunate resemblance to the comic strip character Ziggy.
Astro Boy does battle with various robots as he fights for robot kind against an evil President voiced by Donald Sutherland who is one of those sketchy Commanders in Chief who are somehow able to devote 100 percent of their time and energy to a film’s main characters despite ostensibly being one of the most powerful and busy people in the world.
Astro Boy ends by teasing a sequel but the film was such a pronounced failure at the box-office that Imagi, the animation studio that created it, went out of business.
That’s no great loss. Astro Boy is a deeply strange movie filled with dark, challenging ideas and themes it lacks the depth, substance and intelligence to handle. It’s a shallow, superficial movie that makes the fatal mistake of lurching unsteadily into some very deep thematic waters.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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