Astro Boy’s Retrofuturistic World Has Hints of Real-Life Tech

When Dr. Tenma loses his son, Toby, in a tragic accident, he creates a robot doppelganger—Astro Boy—that eventually goes on to save the denizens of Metro City. PM talks to director David Bowers about integrating real-life tech into Astro Boy’s retrofuturistic world.

When Astro Boy debuted as a Japanese manga comic almost 50 years ago, people had an out-of-this world notion of what the future would look like. The animated movie, out Oct. 23, reflects that retrofuturistic worldview, where humans exist side-by-side with androids and take hovercars to work. But the movie is not entirely faithful to the comic or the anime series. “I took some liberties with the story,” says director David Bowers. “I’m not comparing Astro Boy to Shakespeare, but look at all the different versions of Hamlet—you can cut the text and update it, and at the end of the day, it’s still the same story. Look at Adam West’s Batman and Christian Bale’s Batman. They’ve very different—but it’s still Batman. So it’s respectful, but it’s different.”

Astro Boy is the story of Dr. Tenma, head of the ministry of science in Metro City, a high-tech place of prosperity that floats in the sky above Earth. When Tenma loses his son, Toby, in a tragic accident, he builds a robotic replacement powered by positive “blue energy” from a star. The bot has all of Toby’s memories and mannerisms, but Tenma finds that he is not as good as the real thing. So he banishes the bot, who escapes to Earth—rendered one giant junkyard by Metro City, which discards its robots there once they’ve reached the end of their useful lives. On Earth, Toby earns the nickname Astro Boy and must eventually return to Metro City to save it from the Peace Keeper, a huge robot powered by negative red energy that can assimilate and absorb other technologies.

source: popularmechanics