The story of Astro Boy, first a Japanese television cartoon of the 1960s, drew heavily on the story of Pinocchio, with a little robot implanted with the memories of a grieving scientist’s son as its squeaky-clean hero. This computer-animated reinterpretation plays up an environmental message (humankind has littered the world until the privileged have to live in a city hovering above the trash heaps) and the presence of giant fighting robots (the bread and circuses for the surface-dwelling poors), making comparisons to WALL-E and Transformers inevitable. It’s not as loud as Transformers (thank heavens), but it’s also not as whimsical as WALL-E (Bowers goes for gee-whiz action punctuated with cutesy gags, the standard animated model); it’s perfectly satisfactory kid-friendly entertainment.

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