Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
10/30/09
It's
the goal of any “family film” to appeal on at least some level to audiences
of all ages. After all, you don't see very many 5 year-olds at the
movies by themselves and somebody's got to buy their ticket and sit next
to them for 90 minutes. What this usually means is that we get a
story pitched at 5 year-olds and punchlines interspersed between bouts
of flatulence that reference movies, TV shows and songs from before the
movie's target audience was born. This allows adults, sitting next
to said fart-loving kiddies, to think “Ha! Take that, kiddie!
That joke was for ME!” Harder, of course, is to come up with storytelling
that works equally well for all age groups, leaving adult and kid sitting
next to each other in peace actually both following and enjoying the plot.
The best such movies tend to grow up along with us, revealing previously
unseen levels and themes as we age into them, all the while still tickling
our inner child with the stuff that drew us to them in the first place.
David Bowers' Astro Boy, an update of a trend-setting 1960's anime
series I've never seen, should work just this way for kids with the good
fortune to see it now. And even for those of us who'd reached our
mid-30's before it was made, this tale of a scientist driven to madness
by his grief, the lonely robot child he creates and an insidious monster
made of pure political ambition packs a serious punch. While no two
age groups in the audience will see the same movie, Astro Boy is
a flick that rewards, rather than works around, practically any level of
sophistication you bring to it.
In
the Far Flung Future, the world has split along the ultimate divide of
haves and have-nots thanks to the inventions of Dr. Tenma (voice of Nicolas
Cage). High above the Earth floats Metro City, where the well-to-do
enjoy lives of luxury thanks to robots who tend to their every need.
Down below, where the trash and discarded bots of the City rain down upon
them every day, the poor and abandoned scrape together whatever kind of
life they can. But that's of no consequence to the people up above,
least of all their leader President Stone (Donald Sutherland), who's in
a tough re-election fight and hopes to rally the people to his side with
an impressive show of military might. Enter The Peacekeeper, a massive
robot that absorbs not only the physical mass but also the abilities of
anything it touches. To power this amazing machine will require a
new energy source discovered by kindly Dr. Elefun (Bill Nighy): a
Blue Core of pure positive energy. Extracting it from a piece of
a supernovaed star also generated its' opposite, a dark, unstable Red Core
that Stone finds far more interesting. So much so that he loads the
Red Core into the Peacekeeper, which causes it to run amok, vaporizing
Dr. Tenma's son Toby (Freddie Highmore) in the process. Distraught,
Tenma goes to work, building a robotic replica of his dead son, outfitted
with the best defensive technology known to man so he'll never be harmed
again. But the “new” Toby, powered by the Blue Core, can't replace
the original and he decides to shut him down. That defensive technology
makes such a thing easier said than done: Toby can fly, and has super-strength,
and he escapes from pursuing law enforcement sent by Stone, who wants the
Blue Core back. Ending up down below, the robot takes the name Astro
and falls in with a group of robot-salvaging kids including Cora (Kristen
Bell). They work for the Fagin-like Ham Egg (Nathan Lane), who has
his own dark agenda. Astro will need to discover his inner hero if
he's to save himself, his new friends and Metro City, because there's no
way Stone will let that election come without first demonstrating the full
power of The Peacekeeper.
Most
audiences will enjoy Astro Boy as a sort of Superhero Pinocchio,
in which a spunky inanimate object with the mind of a little boy meets
amazing characters and has fantastical adventures while learning to use
what makes him special to kick monster ass. And on this level alone,
the movie is lots of fun. Toby/Astro is a fun little guy from his
goofy hair to his superpowers, and he fights for what's right at every
turn (perhaps having something to do with that goody-goody Blue Core).
Highmore provides solid voice work, as do Bell and the rest of the kids
(the former Veronica Mars is 29 by the way, both blessed and cursed with
a voice that will probably sound like a high-schooler even after she's
joined AARP), and Lane makes a delightfully odious charmer. The animation,
by Hong Kong's Imagi Studios, is lovely, both updating and preserving the
60's anime vibe of the characters while developing a future world of amazing
sights and bright, vibrant colors through which the flying boy soars.
There
are, of course, deeper and darker levels to Astro Boy, evident from
the opening moments when Charlize Theron narrates a video presentation
explaining in the sunniest, happiest possible terms how awesome the exploitation
of robots and Metro City's disregard for the people on the surface are.
And if you don't figure it out then, it'll probably hit you once Dr. Tenma's
resourceful son with a knack for getting himself in trouble gets vaporized.
I'm honestly not sure if the kids in the audience I saw it with got that
part (it's more than a little strange how there's not even a speck of dust
left of Toby but his baseball cap remains unblemished to mock Dr. Tenma),
and by the time it has a chance to sink in, there's a new character who
looks exactly the same to divert them from thinking too much about it.
By this time, the story's got as much in common with Frankenstein
as Pinocchio, and then it goes all Dickensian down on the surface.
Not that these highbrow cross-references don't supply opportunities for
the movie to go to that “I just wanna know where I fit in!” place that's
part of the standard kid's movie formula, they just allow Astro Boy
to do so in a richer, more resonant way that I'm accustomed to.
And
then there's President Stone. Those still rockin' the “W '04” bumper
stickers are probably going to be VERY unhappy with this skillful caricature
of incompetent ambition who sports more than a few unflattering aspects
of our 43rd President. But to get too hopped up on Bush is to miss
the more pressing fact that the utterly, irredeemably odious Stone bares
at least a passing resemblance to virtually EVERY sitting US politician,
now that the only thing we can stand about most of them is the possibility
that they share our party leanings (and even then, it's not like they had
more than two choices). As deliciously voiced by Sutherland, Stone
is the perfect heavy for a smarter-than-average kid's movie because he
hates anything smart, distrusting everything about science except for the
fact that it can make stuff go boom. Of course, he and the Peacemaker
are kindred spirits, siphoning off all the resources they can get their
hands on without contributing anything to a society that needs their destructive
power like a fish needs a bicycle. Stone gets a great little rant late
in the game about why he prefers the negative Red Core and negativity in
general: I feel like he's actually captured the contemporary soul
of politics better than any live-action character I can recall.
Co-writer/director
Bowers (who began his career in the Prince of Egypt-era Dreamworks
animation department and, through them, moved over to Aardman starting
with Chicken Run) is smart enough to know that while all these
themes and big thoughts make for great spice, his audience is here to watch
a character who began life as a Manga hero, and as such, there's no way
to end but with serious hero vs. giant monster action. The climax
delivers the goods, and made me think of what you could do with a Godzilla
movie that pitted the big guy against a nemesis with some real thematic
resonance. An earlier sequence traps Astro in gladiatorial combat
against nasty robots: the movie works hard to have its' cake and
eat it too on the robots-rights issue, and generates enough excitement
to get away with it.
As
I mentioned, I've never seen an episode or read an issue of Astro Boy's
beloved source materials, so I don't know how it will measure up for their
fans. But the audience of kids I saw it with loved it, and as a grown
man who felt the same way, I bet those same kids will see it again in 25
years and marvel at the whole other movie they were missing when they geeked
out on the action and pretty colors. And then they'll geek out on
them all over again. |
