Astro Boy 2003

Astro Boy

The Astro Boy 2003 TV series is a fifty episode animated show created in 2003, for the celebrations of Astro's fictitious birth date, April 7th 2003. The series was licensed for US release by Warner Brothers and a few episodes aired in dub form on their kids' Saturday mornings, but the series was quickly canceled. A dub-only US box set was released soon after. A manga serialization and two video games were created at the same time as the series, and all three use the same new art and standard cast. The games are out in the US but the manga is only in print in Japanese, Italian and French. Several CD soundtracks were released in Japan as well.

HOW DOES IT COMPARE TO OTHER VERSIONS OF ASTRO BOY?

Reactions to this newest version have been mixed. All agree that the animation is spectacular and that Astro has never looked better than he does here, rocketing through an exquisite, utopian future-scape created using the very latest animation technology. Those whose favorite memories of Astro are of the sweet childish themes of the episodic 1980s TV series are frequently dissatisfied with the grim overarching plot of this significantly rougher, harsher adaptation. We must recall, though, that Tezuka himself frequently remarked that he was dissatisfied with the first two animated versions of Astro Boy. Pressures from the networks forced him to downplay the darker social commentary elements of the original manga, and to end each episode on a high note as Astro arrived to heroically save the day, a very different message from the original in which Tezuka did not hesitate to end a story with Astro failing to prevent a genocide or being mutilated and stranded at the bottom of the sea. Charming as the animated Astro's childlike but heroic adventures are, the original manga had a much more political and critical focus, using the tension between humans and robots to teach children about the harsh political realities of racial prejudice. This element, lost in the earlier TV series, comes through stronger than ever in the overarching plot of the new series, which combines elements from all the most famous politically-charged storylines of the original, including the Blue Knight, Atlas, Pluto, Robot Civil War and Robotonia stories. A greater focus is also placed on the dichotomy between Astro's two father figures, Dr. Ochanomizu, who believes in a bright and cooperative future for humans and robots, and Dr. Tenma, who believes that the two races can never coexist, and that robots must either replace humans or be destroyed by them. In essence, this is not, like Naoki Urasawa's Pluto, an adult adaptation which makes the poignant and tragic elements of the original series its primary focus, but it is the first animated adaptation which preserves the original's invaluable ability to present adult issues from Astro's childlike perspective, on a level that children can understand.

Viewed in the context of the larger Tezuka corpus, the earlier TV series effectively ducked the big philosophical question of whether two separate races can coexist without war, a question asked over and over in Tezuka's works from Nextworld to Adolf. This series engages that question head-on, though it still avoids the very grimmest elements of the original, and tends to end each story arc (if not each episode) on a positive note. The 2003 series also throws in more elements from the rest of the Tezuka corpus, particularly in episodes 34 and 35 "Shape Shifter," and "Firebird," which combine sections of Phoenix and Nextworld to explore the character of Rock and his and Astro's relationship to the Phoenix and to the larger reincarnation cycle of the Tezuka universe. Also striking is the inclusion of "Kato," a radically-transformed but nevertheless recognizable version of the Rainbow Parakeet, refigured here as a pyrotechnic-loving terrorist (Ranbow Parakeet fans will enjoy our funny commentary on the alteration). The series also effectively corrects one of Tezuka's least favorite aspects of the series, a story in which he was pressured by his editor to give Astro a darker makeover, and thus had Dr. Tenma recreate him as the violent leader of the robot revolutionaries. That same storyline is used as the core of the new plot, but Astro's role, and Tenma's modifications of Astro, are much more in line with the standard Astro who never stops trying to be a friend to all humans and all robots.

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