It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Dr Evil’s Frisch’s Big Boy rocket ship!
No, it’s only Astro Boy, another Japanese anime hero with fans in high enough Hollywood places to get an Americanized movie version made. Didn’t they learn anything from Speed Racer? Well, maybe that it’s wiser to animate cartoons rather than turn flesh and blood actors into them.
Astro Boy is the holy grail of anime, created by Osamu Tezuka in the 1950s as a manga comic book then turned into a 1960s TV series, inventing the Japanese animation genre. I know that only because I looked it up on Wikipedia, which isn’t entirely reliable, but anime cultists won’t stand for misinformation. Such obsessives are the best audience for Astro Boy while masses already gorged on better ’toons this year shrug it off.
The setup is a high-tech reverse take on Pinocchio, with a precocious boy named Toby (voice of Freddie Highmore) dying in a laboratory accident and then being reincarnated as a robot by his scientist father (Nicolas Cage). Although uploaded with Toby’s memories and personality plus weaponry, Dad rejects the replacement.
Astro Boy, as he’s called, becomes a wanted robot, hunted by a hawkish president (Donald Sutherland) for use as a weapon of mass destruction. Any resemblance to a former US president isn’t coincidental, along with the fact that robot power sources are either blue (good guys) or red (bad guys), like states on election day. Political allegory is a staple of anime but seldom so heavy-handed.
Astro Boy escapes from floating Metro City to Earth below, a wasteland of refuse that WALL-E couldn’t clean up. Earth is where only the poorest humans live, including a juvenile gang scavenging parts for Hamegg (Nathan Lane) to assemble and sell as rock ’em, sock ’em robots. Eventually all of these issues converge in an admittedly spectacular climax. Getting there is the rub.
Director and co-writer David Bowers (Flushed Away) lovingly crafts a kinetic tribute to Tezuka’s source material, filled with whooshing action and finely detailed backgrounds. But even though this is Astro Boy’s screen debut, each character and situation seems familiar from other movies, as if The Iron Giant, Monsters vs Aliens and Robots already bled Tezuka’s legacy dry.
April 28 to May 4 During the Japanese colonial era, a city’s “first” high school typically served Japanese students, while Taiwanese attended the “second” high school. Only in Taichung was this reversed. That’s because when Taichung First High School opened its doors on May 1, 1915 to serve Taiwanese students who were previously barred from secondary education, it was the only high school in town. Former principal Hideo Azukisawa threatened to quit when the government in 1922 attempted to transfer the “first” designation to a new local high school for Japanese students, leading to this unusual situation. Prior to the Taichung First
The Ministry of Education last month proposed a nationwide ban on mobile devices in schools, aiming to curb concerns over student phone addiction. Under the revised regulation, which will take effect in August, teachers and schools will be required to collect mobile devices — including phones, laptops and wearables devices — for safekeeping during school hours, unless they are being used for educational purposes. For Chang Fong-ching (張鳳琴), the ban will have a positive impact. “It’s a good move,” says the professor in the department of
On April 17, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) launched a bold campaign to revive and revitalize the KMT base by calling for an impromptu rally at the Taipei prosecutor’s offices to protest recent arrests of KMT recall campaigners over allegations of forgery and fraud involving signatures of dead voters. The protest had no time to apply for permits and was illegal, but that played into the sense of opposition grievance at alleged weaponization of the judiciary by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to “annihilate” the opposition parties. Blamed for faltering recall campaigns and faced with a KMT chair
Article 2 of the Additional Articles of the Constitution of the Republic of China (中華民國憲法增修條文) stipulates that upon a vote of no confidence in the premier, the president can dissolve the legislature within 10 days. If the legislature is dissolved, a new legislative election must be held within 60 days, and the legislators’ terms will then be reckoned from that election. Two weeks ago Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) proposed that the legislature hold a vote of no confidence in the premier and dare the president to dissolve the legislature. The legislature is currently controlled
RSS