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Kick Butt Thoughtfully
LLEVLLJEEUl An Aniffls Icon Comas to Amssicn
A nalyzing pop culture is not a job for the faint of heart or the
thin-skinned, let me tell you. On a good day, friends and loved
ones will express their amazement that you watch TV or read
comic books for a living. On a bad day, however, those same people
will hurl all manner of invective at you because, well, you watch TV
or read comic books for a living.
The importance of such things to the world at large can be a
mighty hard sell. I mean, yes, we can say that Mickey Mouse car
toons represent groundbreaking achievements in filmmaking and the
marriage of the themes of children's fantasy literature to
the Surrealist aesthetic, but at the same time we're
waxing philosophical about a costrofo-voiced rat
wearing big yellow shoes. Some days you've just gotta
bite that bullet and press on.
I say this because I'm about to argue the cultural
significance of a cartoon about a robot boy with
machine-guns in his butt cheeks.
The last few years have been a boom for the
Japanese animation industry as Amencans have finally
begun to embrace amme in unprecedented numbers.
While overgrown kids my age may have fond memories
of such early Japanese imports as Speed Racer, Kimba
the White Lion and Battle of the p tanets. such cartoons
were never widely available—my wife, who grew up in
Detroit, recalls her hopeless childhood crush on Racer
X, but my Florida bred self never saw an episode of
Speed Racer until 1 was in my 20s. Today my own chil
dren are eager acolytes in the global Pokemon cult
and one can find scads of merchandise for Dragonball
Z and Mobile Suit Gundam at Wal-Mart. Moreover, the
influence of amme on the current generation of
American cartoonists has even penetrated Disney
Studios, much of whose The Lion King was cribbed
from Kimba and whose Atlantis: The Lost Empire was,
in places, virtually indistinguishable from Nippon
Television product.
So it seems an opportune time for Manga Entertainment to haul
out perhaps its biggest gun, 51 episodes of Shm Tetsuwan Atom, the
second series, never before released in the United States, starring
Japan’s most iconographic superhero. Mighty Atom—or as he’s
known in America, Astro Boy. You may not know him, but you've seen
him: shiny black spiky head, black underwear, red boots. Astro Boy.
Created »n 1952 by influential artist Osamu Tezuka—often called
"the Walt Disney of Japan" or simply "the God of Manga"—as a
comic book hero, the story of Astro Boy is at once a fable about a
young boy (albeit a robot boy with nigh-unlimited destructive
power) attempting to find himself and a cautionary tale about the
nght and wrong uses of technology. Like most Japanese popular cul
ture of the '50s, Tezuka's story was born of the mixture of terror and
awe that followed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
but where Toho Studios reacted by embodying Nature's vengeance in
the nightmarish bulk of Godzilla, Tezuka's aim was to show that
there was a positive way to embrace the Atomic Age. Thus, although
his creation is a robot who frequently does battle with missiles,
tanks and monsters, he is first and foremost a boy with a good and
open heart, and therein lies his true power.
Tezuka's vision was a wild success and in 1963 became a long-
running black-and-white cartoon series on Japanese TV. Though it
was not the first anime, Tetsuwan Atom was the first to be interna
tionally distributed, more or less estab
lishing animation as both a viable industry and
an art form in its own right in Japan, much as Mickey Mouse and
Superman did for American cartoons and comic books, respectively.
Despite this success, however, Tezuka was dissatisfied with certain
differences between the animated version of Astro Boy and his orig
inal concept, as the cartoon focused primarily on action and super
heroics, elements which Tezuka felt were the least important aspects
of the story. In 1980, Tezuka was approached to produce a new
series, this time in color, and he jumped at the opportunity to
include those more philosophical elements which the earlier series
had ignored. So expect this release to be the subject of contention
among anime purists—which series is the real Astro Boy?
The "new" adventures are set in the year 2030. against a back
drop of technological accomplishment and social upheaval as new
legislation has awarded equal rights to robots, splitting Earth's
human population into contentious camps. The Minister of Science
and Technology (for what we may assume is Japan, though all names
here are Western) is one Dr. Boynton, a robotics expert so obsessed
with creating a human-like battle robot that he ignores his son Toby,
even when Toby suggests the answer to Boynton's repeated failure,
creating a smaller boy-robot. About a minute into the first episode,
Toby is killed in a hovercar accident, driving the half-mad Boynton
to fashion his new prototype into Toby's likeness and program it
with his son's personality. This creates much dismay among
Boynton's colleagues, who believe that a living
weapon with titanic strength, supersonic flight
capability, lasers in his fingers, and yes, twin
machine-guns that telescope from his butt probably
shouldn't be guided by an eight year old's question
able impulse control. Nonetheless, Boynton insists
and is dismissed from his post. He and robo-Toby go
away together, but it is not long before the volatile
perfectionist Boynton loses his patience with his sur
rogate son's inability to pass for human and rejects
him. Heartbroken, Toby falls in with the cruel owner
of a robot circus, but is rescued by the new Minister of
Technology, Dr. Packadermus J. Elephun (yes, his nose
is enormous), who becomes Toby's new father-figure
and renames him Astro. Further adventures follow
Astro as he enrolls in school and attempts to break
through the anti-robot prejudices of his classmates,
falls in love, and continues to walk that tightrope
between his function as a piece of ordnance and his
real-boy programming—hardware versus software.
The beauty of Tezuka's story is that it resonates all
over the place—it's basically a science-fiction retelling
of Pmocchio , complete with a Geppetto and a
Stromboli, but with a message about bigotry that sur
prises because it is a running theme rather than an
issue-of-the-week. And while other attempts to handle
this theme—Spielberg's A.I. springs to mind—seem
unable to do it with less than the heaviest of hands, the minds
behind Astro Boy keep the level of whimsy high and pile on the
superheroics at just the right time (when you hear the opening tone
of a synth going into Astro's annoyingly catchy theme song, you
know it's time to kick butt). There are a few moments, however, that
may prove disturbing, especially for kids. The death of Toby Boynton
is the first of many tragedies here, and few punches are pulled to
spare the kiddies—I watched the first volume with my children and
had a rough time explaining what happened to Astro’s first love to
my daughter. Still I'd much rather explain the sad parts than have
them edited out.
John Nettles
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8 FLAGPOLE COM JUNE 19. 2002