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1963 • Astro Boy

Tetsuwan Atomu

— Jeffery J. Timbrell —

I was a child of the ’80s and, as everybody knows, Saturday morning cartoons were an essential part of the youth culture back in that time. Especially mine. My appetite for animation was voracious. I watched everything religiously. I would sometimes get my mom to buy certain kinds of cereal just because there were pictures of a cartoon I liked on the box.

I loved all of it.

Cartoons showed me a world outside of my experience, full of over-the-top characters and striking, visually dynamic imagery that stayed with me for the rest of my life. Over the years, I’ve often heard moralist critics bemoan the influence of animation on kids, but the biggest effect animation had on me was that it made me fall in love with storytelling, art, and filmmaking.

One of the most popular cartoons when I was a kid was the remake (and overdub) of Astro Boy that was directed by Noboru Ishiguro. It was a staple of my usual cartoon consumption along with Fables of the Green Forest (Yama Nezumi Rokki Chakku), Voltron (Hyaku Juo Goraion), and Robotech (Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada). Those series were my introduction to Japanese animation.

I didn’t know that anime was from Japan when I was younger, but I always knew when I was watching anime because it was different from its contemporaries. Not just in visual style or the overdubbed voices but in the content of the stories; how they dealt with conflict, how they approached romance and death, and even the story structure. To me, anime always walked a fine line between being daring and realistic and being experimental and over-the-top.

Sometimes it blurred those lines.

Astro Boy was one of those animations that blurred the lines; where one second it could be dealing with really intense drama and tension and the next thing you know, you see Looney Tunes-style sight gags. But it was done so well that, instead of feeling like a contrast, the emotional effect felt like a one-two punch; where the show kept you on your toes wondering what was going to happen next.

I didn’t have the pleasure of watching Osamu Tezuka’s original Astro Boy until I was much older. By that time, I had watched every kind of animation I could get my hands on. From the stop-motion genius of artists like The Brothers Quay and Jan Ävankmajer to the brilliant works created by Don Bluth and Pixar to the stylistic mastery of Hayao Miyazaki and the late Satoshi Kon. So I was expecting the original Astro Boy to be interesting from a historical perspective, but I wasn’t expecting it to blow me away or to affect me emotionally.

I was wrong.

If anything, my experience and age allowed me to have a much deeper appreciation for the original Astro Boy.

To look back on the scope of Osamu Tezuka’s original animation—even with the hindsight of knowing just how influential it would become—Astro Boy’s daring inventiveness is astonishing. It’s not just the story’s broad strokes or the imaginative fights with giant robots who have fallen from grace, it’s the details. Every single episode is brimming with this intricate world-building and rock-solid thematic consistency that takes the story of a little robot boy and gives it a powerful sense of authenticity.

For me, it was a revelation. It was a series that had a simplistic, child-friendly appearance, but underneath, it was a universe of complex ideas: moral questions about the nature of life and humanity, the differences between classes and cultures, and the conflict between our irrational fear of the “other” and a bright and advanced future.

A lot of times the story of Astro Boy is compared to Pinocchio. Where, instead of a toy-maker building a little puppet boy, it’s a brilliant scientist who’s lost his child, seeking to resurrect him within the body of a metallic, living robot. However, I feel the comparison to Pinocchio doesn’t quite do justice to the ideas going on here. For one thing, Astro Boy isn’t trying to become a real boy. He’s always alive, from the very beginning to the very end. It’s humanity who has to come to realize that, and it’s humanity that has trouble seeing the truth about him and the other robots as well.

The entire concept of Astro Boy flips a lot of the conventional science fiction ideas about robots upside down. Where it’s not really the robot who has to learn to be human, it’s the humans who have to learn that the robot is alive. Astro Boy also has a striking rebuttal to a lot of anti-intellectualism and fear-mongering that goes on when discussing robots and technology.

Usually, in western fiction, when a scientist is stricken by grief and invents a robot to replace a loved one, it ends in horrific tragedy. These kinds of stories almost always result in the creations becoming a twisted abomination who take their vengeance on humanity for daring to play God. The narrative of the “evil robot mind that we cannot trust” is not just seen in fiction, but all over newspapers and the Internet. Where even the suggestion of an artificial intelligence is inevitably followed by comments of “Skynet” and Terminators. People imagining dystopian futures where armies of marching metal men crush our civilization underfoot at the command of some all-powerful A.I.

The funny thing is, we’ve built many machines in the past capable of destroying us, from weapons of mass destruction to industry that creates toxic pollution. So what makes sentient robots so particularly terrifying? The bias seems to suggest that it’s not so much the nature of machines that scare us, but the nature of intelligence.

Especially an intelligence like our own.

Astro Boy is a proud and defiant rebuttal of that anti-intellectual mindset. Astro Boy’s imagery—especially during his creation in the first episode—mirrors the classic themes of films like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and James Whale’s Frankenstein. It uses that style of imagery to build tension about the scientist inventing an artificial life. But that is where the similarities end. From the very first episode of the series, Astro Boy is not some monster or cold unfeeling android, he is the very best of us. He is innocent and curious, caring and strong; so strong in fact, that he doesn’t like to fight because he doesn’t have anything to prove. He’s different from us, but instead of his differences setting him apart, those differences help him give us a new perspective on ourselves.

In this way, Astro Boy sets the classic Frankenstein story on its head. It takes all the paranoia surrounding technology and invention and turns it upside down, where instead of technology becoming our doom, it’s our salvation.

There will always be people who live in fear, afraid of new inventions just the same as they’re afraid about the effects of cartoons on kids. Astro Boy shows how our inventions and technology—like our art—doesn’t always have to reflect the worst of us, it can reflect the best of us, too. Pretty impressive for an old cartoon about a little robot boy who flies around with jetpacks in his boots.

Jeffery J. Timbrell is a writer, filmmaker, artist, and photographer with giant space worms in his brain. He lives in Canada with his two cats, a basement full of DVDs, and a ton of regrets.