"I'm not comparing Astro Boy to Shakespeare, but look at all the different versions of Hamlet-you can cut the text and update it, and at the end of the day, it's still the same story." Director David Bowers, on updating the 1960s Japanese manga comic for his animated feature film opening this weekend. Popular Mechanics gets Bowers talking about the way he incorporated 21st-century technology into his vision of a roboticized futureworld. "I just really love the idea of nanobots, they're very cool," Bowers says. "And if you're doing a sci-fi movie, you have to have military tech. You have to have robots with big guns." The article doesn't mention whether or not Bowers equipped Astro Boy with a high-tech, super-fast liquid gel called Astroglide that he uses to get out of tight situations. Like, say, if our large-headed young hero has to use his rocket propulsion powers to blast though a particularly small and uncomfortably dry tunnel... Astroglide to the rescue! READ MORE

Seriously.Astro Boy! Is anyone actually going to watch this? Me and a bajillion fandorks saw the extended clip at SD ComicCon and it was so that baroque-ass expensive meh where you HAAAAAATE it for existing (until they hire you, tralalala). Hollywood keeps comparing it to that crackish Wachowski shitshow Speed Racer, crunching numbers and talking about the "hella big fanbase" (their words) but still haven't seemed to isolate the real problem behind the source material. It's not that anime adaptations won't work, it's that nobody, beyond metal-lunchbox striped-tights types, gives a shit about this franchise domestically (aaaaand the message boards EXPLODE). READ MORE