Astro Boy: Reboot

Small Screen Specials, Series and Direct-To-Video
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GeorgeC

Astro Boy: Reboot

Post by GeorgeC » March 22nd, 2015, 9:14 pm

This is a French/Japanese co-production...



Character design looks very European. Not so sure how I feel about the hybridized/videogame look of it. It's sort of distracting to me... It really looks less like a TV show and more like something I'd play on a PlayStation.

This will be the fourth time the Astro Boy manga has been adapted into a TV series.

I've seen the original 1963 TV series and while it's charming it's not something I care to own... (I liked what I've read of the original manga better to be honest...)
I own the 1980 color series but have not watched all of it.
The less said about the 2003 TV series, the better I feel! It was NOT localized very well in the States.
Still have not seen the Imagi Astro Boy CGI movie (2009) but have only heard mixed reviews of it.

Will the fourth time really click or is the original series just too iconic/timeless to top?

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Re: Astro Boy: Reboot

Post by Randall » March 22nd, 2015, 11:03 pm

All previous shows had their charms, with the second one probably hitting the sweet spot. The first series was amateurish, and the third tried too hard to be edgy (though I did think it kind of cool, from what I've watched of it). The CGI film was inoffensive, but really rather uninteresting.

This new show doesn't really do it for me yet, based on this early look. Some nice design work, but it looks to be aimed at a young audience--- which is fine, but for me it doesn't appeal too much. I'd be curious to see an actual episode, though.

GeorgeC

Re: Astro Boy: Reboot

Post by GeorgeC » March 23rd, 2015, 12:46 am

The original Astro Boy TV series had a very low budget. The animation from what I was told was done on 4's, 6's, and 8's... Because of this, the animation/movement tends to be very choppy in that show. It's a show that's best appreciated on the strengths of characterization and plots than it is the actual animation.
(Likewise for the old 1960s Marvel Superheroes TV series. THAT was ULTRA-LOW animation where basically the only redrawing/new animation were mouth movements and explosions with four or less drawings! The cels were literally xeroxed from the actual comic book artwork of the day! You don't watch those episodes for the animation... You watch it if you like those old comics and can appreciate the voicework and flavor of those old stories.)
For anybody that doesn't know, most (traditional) Disney feature animation was shot on one's meaning for every bit of movement a single drawing was exposed once so in theory 24 drawings per second of film were created. They didn't always do 24 drawings a second but that was the standard. (Even Disney likes to save money and they DID cheat once in a while when they could get away with it.) Warner Bros and other animation studios generally shot on 2's (2 exposures per drawing) for their animated shorts to save time and money and the animation was perfectly fine unless they had to do zoom's or certain kinds of movement (running, diving boards) that had to be done on 1's. What Disney did was sort of overkill unless there was a really good reason to do animation on 1's.

Anime is usually done on 4's or more (in the case of Astro Boy to really, really save a lot of money!) unless it's required to do more drawings for specific movements. That's why there are a lot of still drawings moved across screen and a lot of camera moves and background effects. They're basically fooling people into thinking there's more movement onscreen than there actually is! When you really pay attention to anime, you see a lot of backs of characters (and no mouths) when they're talking or characters just standing there! (There's a joke that the characters in Dragonball Z did more standing around and yelling that they were gonna rip the other guy apart than actually fighting! That literally was true!) The stillness is also why the drawings in anime TV productions tend to be more detailed and colorful than their American TV counterparts were. Most anime features also have very limited animation but because of higher budgets they can take more time to do decent animation when they have to AND draw and color better than most TV shows.

I've read that quite a bit of money was spent on the 2003 Astro Boy TV series. I think the budget per episode was ridiculously high for an anime series -- they were banking too much on the Astro Boy name to make money. It was not a huge hit anywhere from what I've read. They have never seemed to equal the popularity of the original Astro Boy TV series... I don't think even the 1980 revival (which was the last Astro Boy TV series supervised by his creator, Osamu Tezuka) was as well-liked as the original. Astro Boy is sort of like Mickey Mouse. He's recognized as an iconic figure BUT nobody working in the anime industry now (that cares about the character) quite knows HOW to recapture the essence of what made the character work in the first place with ANY consistency and they've had a hard time trying to recreate the character for newer generations...

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Re: Astro Boy: Reboot

Post by LastActionHero » June 8th, 2015, 10:42 am

Astro boy has a special nostalgic place in my heart. So I hope that reboot won't suck.
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