Astro Boy ( **1/2 )

October 20, 2009 4:42 p.m. EST

93 minutes

In theaters October 23, 2009

Rating: PG, Animated adventure

It's every kid's fantasy: having super-strength, X-ray vision, blistering speed, and the rocket-propelled ability to fly.

But it's also every kid's nightmare: being rejected by dad, being told you're not who you think you are, and not really fitting in anywhere.

That's the double-edged sword unsheathed in Astro Boy, an early example of what we now call anime, having started out as a Japanese comic book in 1951.

It's a CG-animated science fiction adventure about a little robot boy who looks like Bob's Big Boy But Smaller and who acts like Mighty Mouse and, in Japan, is nearly as famous and familiar an icon as Mickey Mouse.

The film is set in the futuristic flying island of Metro City, which hovers above Earth -- which has been turned into a junkyard -- with its population of humans attended by servant-class robots (Surrogates, anyone?).

A brilliant physicist, devastated by the tragic loss of his son Toby during a failed experiment involving a newly discovered power source, builds a robot replica of his late child and gives him superhuman powers.

Implanted with Toby's personality and memories, the robot duplicate thinks that he's actually human until someone convincingly tells him otherwise. Realizing that his father doesn't really want him, he comes down to Earth, where old robots are routinely dumped, and settles in with some orphaned children.

He is renamed Astro Boy.

Meanwhile, Metro City's militaristic and megalomaniacal president attempts to steal the energy source implanted in Astro Boy's chest so he can put it to use to aid his re-election campaign.

Freddie Highmore provides the voice of Astro Boy, and is supported by an ensemble featuring lots of familiar celebrity voices, including Nicolas Cage (who, as the father, doesn't sound as if he believes one word he says), Donald Sutherland, Kristen Bell, Samuel L. Jackson, Charlize Theron, Bill Nighy, Eugene Levy, and Nathan Lane.

British director David Bowers (2006's Flushed Away), working from a screenplay he co-wrote with Timothy Harris, allows his themes to abound and awkwardly collide -- the ecology, alienation, discrimination, destiny -- with some of them handled rather preachily.

More problematic are the central father-son relationship, which enerates the intended poignancy,and numerous attempts at humor, most of which feel forced and stale. So, no, the film will not win any memorability contests.

But that won't bother youngsters much They'll enjoy the many action sequences -- the film's best features by far -- which are truly kinetic and magically dynamic.

Originality is by no means the trump suit of Astro Boy, which was a TV series in the 1960s and 1980s. The feature film seems cobbled together from bits and pieces of lots of other movies, with echoes of Pinnochio; Transformers; A.I. Artifical Intelligence; I, Robot; The Iron Giant; Oliver Twist; and WALL-E.

But although AB is not the kind of animated attraction that speaks to several generations simultaneously, it should not so much inspire as please its young target audience with technical polish, narrative detail, and orchestrated exuberance.

This is an overly familiar but still serviceable PG-rated cartoon.  The younger you are, the more likely you are to say, "Aye, robot" to Astro Boy.