“Yesterday’s” Comic> Astro Boy movie adaptation #1

“There’s got to be a pair of pants around here somewhere!”

Astro Boy The Movie Official Movie Adaptation #1

IDW Publishing (August, 2009)

This is a four-part adaptation of the CG movie by Imagi Studios. Longtime BW readers may recall I reviewed the four-part IDW-produced prequel back when my comic reviews were weekly. Well, that’s hardly a prequel as the movie is a rebooted origin for Osamu Tenzaka’s “Mighty Atom” and the prequel doesn’t make any sense AS a prequel because of it.

I had held off on reviewing this comic until I saw the movie and then never had a chance to review, or even read, the comic, just coming across it recently. So I figure it’s long overdue. When there aren’t any new comics to review our bonus edition of “Yesterday’s” Comic will finally get this reviewed.

Toby is your average genius kid living on the flying city of Metro City, a land where robots do all the serious labor. Toby’s dad, Dr. Tenma (voiced for some reason by Nicholas Cage in the movie), is usually too busy for his son. But when Toby is killed after the mayor screws up an experimental robot, Tenma and his partner, Dr. Elefun, create a robot in his image and with his memories. However, Tenma’s attempts to keep the “boy” interested in science overlooks the fact that he still thinks he’s a young boy and he feels he made a mistake.

What they got right: So far it’s a proper adaptation. Events are only as compressed as they need to be, characters are given a proper introduction and we get just close enough to Toby to be sad to see him killed off. (By the way, killing a kid in an American family movie took some guts but they made it work.) The concept of the blue and red core energies will come into play again later as robo-Toby (our titular Astro Boy) has the blue core energy in him, the source of his life.

What they got wrong: Tenma, on the other hand, is hard to feel sorry for. He spent so little time with his son that he didn’t realize Toby did more than absorb facts and had interests beyond science. I also understand his issue with non-Toby robots given that real-Toby was killed by one he made but he’s treating robo-son like we assume he would his real son, and he seems to expect the kid to act like a robot. The best example is the scene that gives Tenma concerns, and someday I should do a Video Review of the movie. Tenma has robo-Toby study a bunch of books but “Toby” uses the pages to actually try out the theories of flight presented in the books. While father and son (assuming robo-Toby has all of real-Toby’s personality despite getting it from a strand of real-Toby’s hair because science) both love science they have different approaches and you’ll see next issue how little Tenma really understood his son.

Recommendation: I will say that I rather enjoyed the movie but if you prefer comics to movies this is off to a good start. It’s an interesting reboot of Tenzaka’s creation.