Kubrick vs Astro Boy

Often the enjoyment of Kubrick's film is the obscure attention to detail that they contain. This at times can become obsessive in the level of detail, such as John Coulthart's post about the record store scene in Clockwork Orange.

I recently watched the 1980s series Astro Boy with my daughter and started to notice similarities to the film A.I. which at first I thought were coincidence but as is often the case with Kubrick he left little room for chance in his work.

The development of A.I. Artificial Intelligence was undertaken by Kubrick but directed by Steven Spielberg in 2001 after his death in March 1999 and for this reason the film is not really taken very seriously by people writing about Kubrick. Although many of the ideas contained in the film were directly inspired by Kubrick's concepts it is ultimately the pairing of Spielberg and Kubrick that doesn't quite work. The film plot centres around the journey of a boy robot in his quest to become 'real'.

In many respects A.I. owes a great deal to the work of manga artist Osamu Tezuka who created the original Astro Boy comic which was translated into animated episodic form for TV in both 1960 and 1980. I have always seen the connections to the story of Pinocchio within A.I. but within the origin story of Astro Boy there are striking similarities with the old Italian fable too.

Tobio the son of a robot maker is killed in a car accident and his father builds Astro Boy to replace his dead son. When the robot is rejected by his father he is sent to a robot circus. Very similar to the themes contained in the film A.I.

It wasn't until I looked for a biography of Osamu Tezuka that I noticed the following:

After seeing Astro Boy, film director Stanley Kubrick asked Tezuka to be the art director for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unfortunately, Tezuka had to turn Kubrick down, because he couldn’t afford to be away from his studio and live in England for an entire year.

Which meant that the Astro Boy connection was more than a mere coincidence! Obviously Kubrick had been directly influenced by Tezuka's work and not just in A.I. but enough to want Tezuka to style the look and feel of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Astro Boy in Japan is called Tetsuwan Atomu which literally translates as "Iron Arm Atom" and is very much a cultural product of the Nuclear age during the cold war.

Bearing this in mind it seems that when Astro Boy rides a nuclear bomb into the sun in the final epsiode of the 1960 cartoon version (episode 193) we are instantly reminded of the end of another film by Kubrick called Dr.Strangelove (1964) when Slim Pickens rides a nuclear bomb into its target. Or perhaps this could be just another coincidence?