Set in futuristic Metro City, Astro Boy is a young robot with incredible powers created by a brilliant scientist named Dr. Tenma. Powered by positive "blue" energy, Astro Boy is endowed with super strength, x-ray vision, unbelievable speed and the ability to fly. Embarking on a journey in search of acceptance, Astro Boy encounters many other colorful characters along the way. Through his adventures, he learns the joys and emotions of being human, and gains the strength to embrace his destiny. Ultimately learning his friends and family are in danger, Astro Boy marshals his awesome super powers and returns to Metro City in a valiant effort to save everything he cares about and to understand what it means to be a hero. - skip ad -  Genres: Action/Adventure, Comedy, Kids/Family, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Animation and Adaptation Running Time: 1 hr. 34 min. Release Date: October 23rd, 2009 (wide) MPAA Rating: PG for some action and peril, and brief mild language. Distributor: Summit Entertainment, LLC Cast And Credits Starring: Freddie Highmore, Kristen Bell, Nicolas Cage, Samuel L. Jackson, Nathan Lane Directed by: David Bowers Produced by: Maryann Garger

Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Amelia Earhart! No, it’s the strange, somewhat surreal Astro Boy! Faster than a speeding bullet train, more powerful than an adolescent girl or any other gaga creature that comes at him, the Japanese cartoon robot has made the leap to the big American screen, complete with a golly-gee voice (Freddie Highmore), a handful of obligatory action scenes and the usual celebrity add-ons (Bill Nighy, Nathan Lane). Newly revived, he is again forced to wage battle against evil and, more troubling, endure some awfully cruel parenting. And so he zips and zags, keeping aloft in a movie that can’t always do the same.

Created just six years after the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Astro Boy — originally named Tetsuwan Atomu, or Mighty Atom — made his debut in a 1951 manga, taking further flight first in a live-action television show and then in a cartoon. (The Mighty Atom was rechristened Astro Boy when the cartoon hit American TV in the 1960s.) The character was the invention of Osamu Tezuka, a medical student turned manga and anime visionary who is widely considered the most important and influential figure in post-World War II Japanese animation. (American children who grew up watching television in the ’60s will fondly remember another of his creations, Kimba the White Lion.)

Directed by David Bowers, making his solo debut (he was one of two directors on “Flushed Away,” from Aardman Animations), the movie serves as an introduction to Astro Boy and his origin story and, no doubt, a wished-for rebooted franchise. The story, set in an indeterminate future, opens with scenes from the life of a whiz kid, Toby (Mr. Highmore), the son of a goateed scientist, Dr. Tenma (Nicolas Cage). Before you know it, Toby has gone poof in an experiment gone wrong — involving blue energy, red energy, a giant robot and the insinuating voice of Donald Sutherland — leaving behind only a baseball cap and a strand of hair. Dr. Tenma subsequently pulls a Dr. Frankenstein and, voilà: Astro Boy.

When Dr. Tenma rejects the robot boy, heartache follows, along with adventure and various high and low cultural references, some obvious (“Pinocchio”), others obscure (“Kiss Me Deadly,” another atomic-age artifact). It’s not inapt for a movie that raises the question of human consciousness to drop Descartes into the mix — Dr. Tenma believes in the classics, as do Mr. Bowers and his fellow screenwriter, Timothy Hyde Harris — but it’s a little kooky in such a kiddie-centric movie. It’s also a throwaway, as are the nods to Lenin and Trotsky that pop up when Astro Boy, after falling to Earth, as all heroes must, encounters the Robot Revolutionary Front. Moments like these seem mostly designed to flatter the grown-ups. (Didn’t work.)

Like a lot of movies, “Astro Boy” has been designed to function on different levels and serve different audiences, but in this case these multiple meanings and points of address have created a confusion of tone. The story’s undertow of darkness pulls you in one direction, while Astro Boy’s insistent cheerfulness, which seems more commercially motivated than personality-driven, pulls you somewhere else. This jaggedness extends to the visual design, which at times intriguingly recalls the flat, graphic style of the 1950s, yet also often looks thinly conceived, sketchy, even cheap. Somewhat more rounded than the original character, Astro Boy, meanwhile, now brings to mind the chubby mascot for the restaurant chain Big Boy. Maybe the fuller figure is part of his Americanization.

“Astro Boy” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). A few of the small children in the theater in which I saw the movie occasionally screamed, but it’s unclear if they were frightened, bored or hungry.