This movie tells Astroboy's origin story. In the floating Metro City, young Toby's scientist father (Nicolas Cage) is responsible for a scientific accident in which Toby is killed. Overcome by remorse, he creates a robot duplicate into which he transfers Toby's memories (as well as rocket powered flight and assorted weaponry), but then finds himself unable to accept the substitute because he is a robot. Robot Toby finds friends among orphaned children and robots down on the ground before he has to fight the robotised President Stone (Donald Sutherland) who wants the blue power source used to activate Toby (now called Astro). Mayhem ensues.<br /><br />There is a lot of good stuff here. CGI suits the anime look, the story is sound and exciting, there's quite a lot of funny stuff and some excellent action, and the voice talent is great.<br /><br />There is an interesting and effective subtext about prejudice and exclusion - it isn't used to beat you about the ears with, but should register on an unconscious level.<br /><br />I was somewhat askance that the movie starts off in such a downbeat fashion, with the death - no bones about it, he's completely dead, blasted to smithereens in fact - of the original human Toby. I'm still not too sure of the impact that is likely to have on youngsters, but maybe that says more about me as a Dad than it does about kids, because those in the cinema seemed to enjoy it.