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This is perhaps not the ideal way to experience Astro Boy.

A disclaimer: I have not read the original manga by Osamu Tezuka, nor watched anything of the anime, save for the first episode of the 1963 series. Therefore, I cannot really compare this remake by Akira Himekawa to other versions. What I can judge, however, is how this version stands on its own.

This feels like a very condensed version of the Astro Boy story. The pacing suffers from this, as everything happens so fast that the emotional punches don't really carry much weight. While the art is nice to look at, the paneling is often ... confusing to the point I can't understand what is happening, and a lot of the time the manga just feels like a montage of the original story.

As for the story, it's good. There are lots of philosophical questions asked about the future of AI and the rights of intelligent robots, and in many ways you can draw parallels between the robots as the working class and humans as the middle/upper class. If you look at it from another perspective, the relationship between the robots and the humans could be seen as a comment on immigration and racism. All this packed in a child friendly way, that hopefully gets children thinking about some more difficult questions. Too bad the story loses its punch with the condensed pacing.

All in all, I don't think this is the best way to experience Astro Boy. Still it is a short version of the story that won't take up much of your time, so if you just want to get the gist of the story without having to plough through 20+ volumes of the original, this one might do the trick.

Buriburi Oukoku no Hihou was a bit disappointing compared to the first movie.

The jokes do not feel as tight and clever, and I would say that this second film suffers too much from what I would call "TV-series gets made into feature film cliches". I lost interest in the story pretty quickly, I kept looking at my watch, and the movie felt much longer than one and a half hours. The new supporting characters felt lackluster.

It did still however have its moments here and there. The animation in the fighting scenes escpecially is pretty nice. If you are a fan of Crayon Shin-chan ... it might still be worth checking out.

Well, this was good! I was initially worried about the CGI-animation of the characters, but got used to it pretty quickly. It is very nicely done and gets you thinking about Zelda: The Wind Waker's art. Even if I still would have prefered a traditionally animated interpretation of the story, I don't think this is something that should stop people from giving this series a fair chance. And the background paintings is extremely good looking, it truly is a feast for the eyes to see swedish nature depicted in this way!

With as much as 26 episodes the series gets a long time to adapt the ... book in a fair way, which it does from beginning to end, with some extra fluff that doesn't take away anything from the experience. If you would compare it to the old swedish movie from the 80's, this is definitely the more true to the book. This is because all the relations, events and characters gets the time they deserve to be built up properly. In the movie they basically just piled up all the key scenes as tightly packed as possible, without giving any emotional connection to anything. This is where Sanzoku no Musume Ronja succeeds splendidly.

However, something they did not succeed in was that special feeling of norse fairy tale creatures. The interpretation of the rumphobs (rumpnissar) is pretty awful, both personality-wise and appaerance-wise. The wild harpies (vildvittror) maybe would have worked in a more detailed 2D-animated style, but now they look too flat and cheap. A good equivalent to their classic catchphrase, "Nu ska blodet rinna!" (literally: "now the blood shall flow") is also missing. The gray dwarves (grådvärgar) and the unearthly ones (de underjoriska) were okay though.

Something that the series managed, that neither the old movie nor the book did, was to give all the robbers in Matt's Fort their own distinct personalites. I greatly appreciated this. And also, the interpretation of Skalle-Per was terrific.

Besides some dumb mistakes, like the fact that they pick blueberries and raspberries in spring (they don't become ripe until late summer), the swedish nature is depicted well. Sometimes the tempo maybe was too slow, but this helped more than becoming a hindrance. The thing I missed most from the movie was all the beautiful accapella harmony songs.

This is most definitely the best work of Goro Miyazaki so far. But then he also got really good source material from the great Astrid Lindgren! A fantastic story that always is relevant to people in all ages. Strongly recommended to everyone, give it a fair chance!