Whatever Happened to Astro Boy 2003?

Welcome to ANIWIRE! This week we are talking about Astro Boy 2003, a high-profile reboot of the classic character that suffered from a botched international release. Before that, though, here’s the news from the past week.

News

• In a different branch of the animation industry than we typically write about, 50 VFX animators at Marvel have voted to file for a union election. This is a long-overdue step in an industry that has repeatedly treated their artists like garbage despite their importance to the profession.
• Nakaya Onsen directed the opening credits for the upcoming video game Fate/Samurai Remnant at CloverWorks. Great stuff!
• Anime legend Shinya Ohira made an appearance on the most recent episode of One Piece together with Akihiro Ota. Gear 5 stays winning….
• A new trailer was released for Komada - A Whiskey Family, the newest film made by P.A. Works and directed by the talented Masayuki Yoshihara (The Eccentric Family.)
• Anime News Network reported Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken’s creator Sumito Owara’s words about his experiences with disability, neurodivergence and political correctness. I also apprecited Lynzee Loveridge’s thoughts about the subject on Twitter.

Bookmarks

• Lynzee Loveridge wrote about the late Aniplex producer Hiroe Tsukamoto, interviewing many of his friends, coworkers and past acquaintances.
• Quill and Quire wrote about Susumu Higa’s manga collection Okinawa and the saga of its English release by Mangasplaining and Fantagraphics.
• Nate AM at Artist Unknown interviewed Shunpei Gunyasu and Takuya Saitou, two young artists at Trigger’s new Fukuoka branch. Producer Masahiko Otsuka is also there. Nate also wrote up Studio Orange’s second panel at Otakon.
• Speaking of Artist Unknown, I forgot to link PurpleGeth’s great piece about Vinland Saga’s anime adaptation last week! Here it is.

AMV of the Week

Here’s “dogs and ducks” by Lord.

On October 26th, 2023, the anime series “PLUTO” is finally airing on Netflix. First announced at Annecy International Animation Film Festival in 2017, it’s an adaptation of an award-winning manga series by Naoki Urasawa, produced by anime legend Masao Maruyama at Studio M2. There’s plenty we don’t know about how the series was made or why it took so long. I figure that we’ll see some digging by anime journalists when the show airs in the fall. But what’s relevant to our purposes, this week, is that PLUTO is the latest adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy.

Astro Boy occupies a funny place in the history of manga and animation. You can read about the character and his story in this piece I wrote for Slash Film back in the day. To summarize: it’s about a child robot superhero named Atom who saves the day with the power of hope and love, and the 1963 television series that bears his name is a landmark in the history of Japanese animation. You can praise Tezuka’s staff at Mushi Production for the scope of their ambition in the face of challenging circumstances. You can also curse them for setting an unrealistic standard for time and cost that haunts the anime industry to this day. Regardless, Astro Boy was a hit, and Atom remains the face of Tezuka’s work even if some fans prefer the likes of Black Jack or Phoenix. It also did very well in the United States, laying the groundwork for the medium’s later success.

Like the rest of Tezuka’s output, Astro Boy has been constantly remade and remixed. The 1980 remake brought the original black-and-white series into the world of color. There was a 2009 CG movie, and an alternate reality prequel titled Atom: The Beginning. Then there’s PLUTO, of course. Just as you’d expect from Naoki Urasawa and his long-time editor Takashi Nagasaki, it’s a mix of conspiracy thriller, mystery box and sentimental character drama. In one chapter, a grumpy pianist and a robot bond over their shared instrument. In another, alternate reality Saddam Hussain takes the United States to task for the Iraq War. Through it all runs Geischt, a detective with repressed memories chasing a mysterious killer. Atom is there too, although he appears as a human child rather than the cute mascot of Astro Boy.

I’m excited to see PLUTO make its way to Netflix, if only because I’m excited to see more folks experience this wild story. Osamu Tezuka’s story “The Greatest Robot on Earth” is a real humdinger, and PLUTO keeps the spirit of the source alive even as Urasawa and company expand its scope. While I admire PLUTO’s ambition, though,  it isn’t my favorite version of Astro Boy. That’s the 2003 version, an award-winning series featuring some of the best writing and animation of the early aughts. Astro Boy 2003 combines the charm of the 1963 original, the visual fidelity of the 1980 remake and even a bit of PLUTO’s weirdness. It even inspired Treasure’s classic GBA beat-em-up Astro Boy: Omega Factor. Yet despite the best intentions of its creators, Astro Boy 2003 is only available today on DVD with an English dub, story edits and a changed soundtrack. The original Japanese edit of the series is not available in English unless you go hunting in the back corners of the internet.

How could this have happened? Certainly not by choice. Tezuka Productions meant for their new Astro Boy reboot to be a global success, just like the original in 1963. They hired anime industry legend Marc Handler (whose resume includes the likes of Voltron and FLCL) to serve as creative supervisor, so as to tailor the series for United States television. Handler was amazed by the dedication of the Japanese staff. “Imagine if a group of Americans decided that they wanted to do a new version of Huck Finn,” he said in an interview with uno10, “and distribute it globally so that people all over the world would…have the same feeling and connection with the character that we Americans have?” Handler was joined by other English-speaking television writers including industry workhorses Dennys McCoy and Pamela Hickey.

The majority of the episodes, though, were written by Japanese scriptwriters. One was Keiichi Hasegawa, who is best known these days for scripting Studio Trigger’s Gridman Universe. Another is Chiaki Konaka, whose love of cyberpunk and Lovecraftian horror defined a generation of anime fandom. Not to mention Sadayuki Murai, an idiosyncratic writer who wrote the script for Perfect Blue as well as the “Pierrot le Fou” episode of Cowboy Bebop. The skeleton key, though, is Ai Ota, whose specialty was not anime but tokusatsu. Her name appears throughout the Ultraman series of the 2000s, including Tiga, Dyna and Nexus. Connect the dots, and the truth is revealed: much of the writing staff of Astro Boy 2003 was sourced directly from the early 2000s Ultraman brain trust. Even the show’s director, Kazuya Konaka, was primarily experienced directing live action tokusatsu series. (He was also Chiaki Konaka’s brother.)

Ultraman has always been the most ambitious of Japan’s three major tokusatsu franchises. The early 2000s saw the franchise at its creative peak, pumping out incredible stand-alone episodes while introducing serialization to the series formula. This wouldn’t last forever, of course. 2004’s adult-oriented Ultraman Nexus was a commercial failure that spelled the end of Tsubaraya’s once limitless creative freedom. But in 2003, folks like Hasegawa and Ota were flying high. Ultraman had offered them a stage on which they could tell children’s stories in whatever way they wanted. Astro Boy 2003 offered similar opportunities, with the blessing of Tezuka Productions.

It’s unsurprising, then, that these writers came into direct conflict with Marc Handler. “I think Mark himself will look back on the experience as terribly difficult…” said Ai Ota in a video interview. Handler’s job as creative supervisor required him to inform the production staff of broadcast standards in the United States. Endangering children on screen, for instance, was not allowed. In the uno10 interview, Handler references Ai Ota’s episode “Denkou” where Astro must save a child wearing an explosive belt. Handler loved the episode, saying that it was “exciting, had a lot of heart, and would work for Japanese and international viewers.” He also believed that US broadcasters would never allow the episode to air unaltered. The Japanese staff held their ground and the episode aired in Japan as it was. Ota would say in the video interview that Handler “gradually became like a snake” over the course of production.

Ai Ota and her peers believed that it was their responsibility with Astro Boy 2003 to do justice to Tezuka’s work. That meant challenging their audience to see the world in a different way. “While showing things that are emotionally difficult or painful,” Ota said, “we want to…impart to children this way of seeing as realistically as possible.” It was important to her that the series not shy away from difficult subjects. Being a child can be tough, after all. Series director Kazuya Kodaka agreed. “Rather than presenting problems that have never been seen before,” he said, “we want to explore problems that exist now in our world.” Similarly, character designer and general animation director Shinji Seiya hoped that the values of Astro Boy 2003 would make an impact on the next generation, even if the series itself was forgotten.

Astro Boy 2003 lived up to the hard work and high standards of the production staff. Zac Bertschy called it “the most beautiful, gorgeously animated thing to ever appear on Japanese television” in his review of the first episode. Discotek Media producer Mike Toole named it as his “favorite version of Astro Boy” in a 2015 column for Anime News Network. Even Marc Handler remembers it as “one of my favorite projects of all time…” Which brings us back to our starting point. If Astro Boy 2003 is so good, and was pitched from the beginning as a work of cross-cultural exchange, why doesn’t anybody in the English-speaking fandom ever talk about it?

Marc Handler was right. Broadcasters in the United States were frightened by every little thing Handler had warned about during the show’s production. The best intentions of the Ultraman staff wouldn’t fly on a time slot for American children. Dialogue was rewritten, the soundtrack was changed and the format was cut from 16:9 to 4:3. “Denkou” was revised, as was every other “problem episode.” Atom’s English voice actor transformed him from the innocent peace-maker of the original into a rough-and-tumble hero type. Nobody involved with the series was happy with these changes, including Handler. “ I think some of the decisions they made were off the mark,” he said, “and I think they would have benefited by more communication with the directors and producers in Japan.”

Today Astro Boy 2003 is available in English via a Mill Creek DVD release. Unfortunately this version is the same 4:3, English dubbed version that was aired on US television. There is no way to legally obtain the uncut Japanese version with English subtitles. There isn’t even a BluRay version of the edited English edition. I’d love to see Toole and his buddies do a proper release for the series over at Discotek. But Astro Boy 2003’s roots at Sony likely complicate any attempt to restore the show to its original form outside Japan.

Astro Boy 2003 was a series made at cross purposes. Tezuka Productions wanted an international hit. The production staff hoped to do justice to Tezuka’s original comic by telling complex stories for children and adults. Producers and broadcasters in the United States wanted an action-packed superhero show they could air on television for kids. While the series was a creative success, it was kneecapped by its distribution abroad. Writers like Ai Ota, who were so proud of their work, had their episodes changed without their consent. Handler took the fall even though he did what he was employed to do: communicate the tastes of American audiences to the production staff, and then get out of the way.

I don’t know if Astro Boy 2003 would have been any more successful had it been released today. Modern anime fandom in the United States adores Shonen Jump comics and Junji Ito these days. Tezuka lives in the realm of comics scholars and librarians. Similarly, while Tsubaraya has become increasingly prominent in the United States thanks to Gridman and Dynazenon, its 2000s catalog remains obscure. Astro Boy 2003’s audience of a) Tezuka dorks, b) hardcore Ultraman fans and c) ordinary children is undoubtedly a narrow slice of the anime viewing public. Count me among that number, though. Astro Boy 2003 is one of my favorite series of the early 2000s and a case study of what artists can accomplish when given the time and space to make what they like.

That was once the end of the story. No longer. While I won’t link them here, there are now two separate fan projects that translate the whole uncut Astro Boy 2003 series into English. I can vouch for their quality. Even so: with the release of PLUTO, there’s no better time for Sony to do us all a solid and give the 2003 reboot a proper English release.