The smiling boy with the pointy hairdo flying into theaters today in David Bowers' computer-generated film "Astro Boy" isn't just a clever diversion for the kids. He's got a storied past that helped revolutionize manga and launch the artistic explosion that became anime. He also paved the way for the "Pokemon," "Naruto" and "Yu-Gi-Oh" cartoons currently on American airwaves.
After a failed outing early in 1951, when graphic novelist and filmmaker Osamu Tezuka first introduced the robot as the peacemaking Ambassador Atom in a Japanese magazine for boys, "Astro Boy" as we know him was launched a year later.
In the new manga story, brilliant scientist Dr. Boynton loses his son Aster in an automobile accident, so he creates Astro Boy as a replacement. Beneath his cute exterior, the little robot has a 100,000-horsepower engine, rocket jets in his legs and machine guns in his derriere. When Boynton realizes his android can never grow up, he sells Astro to a circus. Dr. Packadermus Elefun rescues him and becomes his surrogate father.
The manga, which would soon go on to become an animated TV series in Japan and in the U.S., tackled social issues in an accessible way.
"The original stories are much more sophisticated than the animated series," says Frederik L. Schodt, author of "The Astro Boy Essays," who notes that, though begun in the '50s, the series was set in 2003. "It's fascinating to see how Tezuka foresaw some of our problems with artificial intelligence, ecology -- even suicide bombing and terrorism. There are stories that address racial discrimination in the United States and discrimination within Japan. He even had Astro Boy go to Vietnam and protect the villagers from American bombers. It's hard to believe all that's built into a story designed for 10-year-old boys."
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Low-budget origins
A celebrated hero in Japan, Tezuka, who produced animated features for Toie Studio, introduced cinematic storytelling into manga, drawing close-ups, master shots and sequences of images that suggest camera moves.
An animated adaptation of "Astro Boy" premiered on Japanese television in 1963 and ran for 193 episodes. It was not the first Japanese animated TV series, but it was the first with a continuing story. Its popularity bolstered the fledgling Japanese animation industry: Until then, Japanese stations had broadcast dubbed American shows.
