Discarding ‘Astro Boy’

Lovely dollops of wit and warmth float through the big screen version of “Astro Boy,” the latest Japanese TV cartoon to make it to the big screen.

But the look, themes and slam-bang “Transformers” violence of that 1960s animated series make this every bit as dated as “Speed Racer,” even if it is easier to watch.

It’s about a Pinocchio with rocket engines for legs, x-ray eyes and a swirly just-got-dunked-in-the-toilet hairdo.

Astro Boy (voiced by Freddy Highmore) is built to replace a lost son by the boy’s scientist father (Nicolas Cage), who makes him indestructible so that he will never “lose him again.”

But Dad changes his mind: “You’re not Toby. You’re just a copy.”

So he’s discarded, like every other robot in robot-happy Metro City, which hovers over littered, polluted planet Earth.

Astro meets the surface dwellers, young Oliver Twist orphans (Kristen Bell voices one) who scrounge busted robots for the Fagin-like Ham Egg (Nathan Lane). He competes in the arena brawls of the Robot Games, falls in with the comical Robot Revolutionary Front and becomes a pawn in the Metro City president’s cynical plans to start a war with the surface dwellers just so he (Donald Sutherland) can win re-election.

Director David Bowers was an artist on “Shark Tale,” “Prince of Egypt” and “Wallace & Gromit,” so he gets the look right. A subversive streak in the script includes Lenin posters in the Robot Revolutionary Front’s hideout, references to the classic horror film “Freaks,” Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, the writings of Descartes and Kant and the inventions of DaVinci.

None of those keep this thinly-plotted cartoon from sagging. An all-star voice cast is almost always a giveaway that the movie isn’t all that, and “Astro Boy” wastes Charlize Theron and Samuel L. Jackson in bit vocal parts.

As “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” proved, the animation bar has been raised, and not just by Pixar. Poor little “Astro Boy” hasn’t a prayer of clearing it.