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http://www.manga.com [Manga Entertainment website]

Analyzing 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 cartoons 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 castrato-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 Americans have finally begun to embrace anime
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
Planets, 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 I was in my 20s.

Today, my own children are eager acolytes in the global
Pokemon cult and one can find scads of merchandise for
Dragonball ZandMobile Suit Gundam at Wal-Mart.
Moreover, the influence of anime 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 Shin Tetsuwan
Atom, the second series, never before released in the U.S.,
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 in 1952 as a comic-book by influential artist Osamu
Tezuka -- often called "the Walt Disney of Japan" or simply
"the God of Manga" -- 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 right and wrong uses of technology.
 
Like most Japanese popular culture 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 internationally distributed, more or less
establishing animation as both a viable industry and an art form
in its own right in Japan, much as the adventures of Mickey Mouse
and Superman did for American cartoons and comic books, respectively. 

Despite his creation's popularity, however, Tezuka was dissatisfied
with certain differences between the animated version of Astro Boy
and his original concept, as the cartoon focused primarily on
action and superheroics, elements Tezuka felt were the least
important aspects of his story. In 1980, he was approached to
produce a new series, this time in color, and he jumped at the
opportunity to include those more philosophical elements 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
backdrop 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 questionable 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 surrogate
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 is resonates all over the
place -- it's basically a science-fiction retelling of
Pinocchiocomplete with a Geppetto and a Stromboli, but
with an anti-bigotry message that surprises 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, Astro Boy keeps the level of whimsy high and piles
on the superheroics at just the right time (when you hear the
opening tone of a synth leading into the show's annoyingly catchy
theme song, you know it's time for Astro 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 -- I watched the
first volume with my children and had a rough time explaining
the ill fate of Astro's first love, a prototype little-girl robot
built to be a walking bomb, to my five-year-old daughter. Still,
I'd much rather explain the sad parts than have them edited out.

With America's growing (and long overdue) acceptance of animation
as an art form for adults, the release of Astro Boy New
Adventures in the United States is a significant event, and
while the exploits of the shiny little punk may lack the
hyperthyroid violence of Dragonball Z or the insidious
marketability of Pokemon, they have the inestimable virtues
of history and heart. For good or ill, we're all anime fans
now, primed for the good stuff, and this is some of the best.