everybody wants to rule the world

I have a passion for flops. Specifically, kids’ media flops— for two reasons. First, no matter how commercial, how overproduced it is, you can always find someone on the crew who actually had something they wanted to say with the story. Second, there will always be at least one kid that perfectly sees what that person wanted to say, and feels it resonate within them.

My all-time favorite movie as a kid was Astro Boy. Astro Boy, for those unaware, is a series that is hailed as the beginning of the manga and anime genres. Created by Osamu Tezuka during the Japanese cultural depression after World War 2, the series skyrocketed its way to international fame, and has been given several anime and manga adaptations which have, themselves, found individual fame. And in 2009, an American computer-animated movie adaptation was released, starring Freddie Highmore, Bill Nighy, Donald Sutherland, Nathan Lane, and Nicolas Motherfuckin’ Cage. It bombed miserably, putting the animation studio behind it out of business.

The plot to most Astro Boy adaptations is this: a brilliant scientist, Dr. Tenma, loses his son, Toby (or Tobio), in a tragic accident. Grief-stricken, he builds a robot that looks like his son to replace him. However, when the robot does not act like his son did, he rejects it, selling it to a robot circus run by shady ringmaster Hamegg. Eventually, the robot is rescued and adopted by Dr. Tenma’s coworker, Dr. Elefun, and it– or he– begins fighting crime under the moniker “Astro Boy.”

The 2009 movie more-or-less follows those beats. Toby Tenma is a brilliant thirteen-year-old boy living in Metro City– a floating city occupied by the ultra-wealthy to escape the polluted Surface. The city runs entirely on disposable sentient robots, whose parts are dumped with the rest of Metro City’s garbage down on the Surface once they begin to deteriorate. Toby’s father, the stern Dr. Tenma, is the head of the city’s Ministry of Science, too focused on developing robotic weapons to pay much attention to his son. At the order of the war-hungry leader President Stone, Tenma commandeers Dr. Elefun’s new discovery– polar opposite Red and Blue Cores which he believes have the capability to restore the decimated environment– to use in a robot called the Peacekeeper, as a weapon against the Surface. Desperate for his father’s attention, Toby sneaks into a military test of the Peacekeeper, which goes berserk once powered by the Red Core and attempts to destroy the indestructible glass separating it and the scientists, killing Toby in the process.

Overwhelmed by guilt, Tenma throws himself into recreating his son in a robotic body powered by the Blue Core, transferring his memories through DNA remnants and arming him with the most advanced weapons systems available, so he won’t lose him again. After he is reanimated, Tenma quits his job and throws himself into parenting the new Toby, only to be unnerved when Toby is rebellious, playful, and free-thinking– a far cry from the Toby that Tenma remembers. Even worse, Toby relates more to the household’s robotic servant, Orrin, than to his own father. All of this causes Tenma to reject the robot as an imperfect copy of his perfect Toby and kick him out of his house, leaving him a target for President Stone, who wants the Blue Core that powers him to wage war on the Surface.

I could go on about this movie for twenty goddamn pages. I watched it for the first time when I was nine, so I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. For a box-office flopping studio killer that is hated by most Astro Boy franchise fans, it has way more to say about class, environmentalism, and identity than you would expect. I haven’t even gotten to talk about the robot communists yet. But, because this is the pride month issue, and because the editors at Porn Star Martini are very kindly allowing me to impulsively rant here, I will calm down and focus in on identity.

This version of Astro Boy is a queer story, regardless of intention. Toby– or Astro, as he is called later in the movie– is a child who is rejected by his father because the person that he really is does not align with the person that his father believes he has created him to be. It’s not the fact that he has laser eyes, or flight, or plasma cannon arms that causes his father to ultimately reject him– after all, that stuff was Tenma’s choice. Instead, it’s his personality, his joys, his reservations. All of these traits, we see in the “real” Toby before his death. And we see the alive Toby repress them when he and his father speak over the phone, matching Tenma’s detached attitude towards him. Only after the death does that detachment disappear, but its absence is unnerving to them both.