Freddie Highmore Talks About 'Astro Boy'

For the first time ever Astro Boy, the popular manga that debuted back in 1951, hits the big screen. Summit Entertainment and Imagi Studios teamed up to bring the story of a little robot to life in a full length animated feature film featuring the voices of Freddie Highmore as Astro Boy, Nicolas Cage as scientist Dr Tenma, and Kristen Bell as Cora, a young Earth girl who befriends Astro Boy. In Astro Boy, scientist Dr Tenma creates a robot fashioned after his deceased son and endows him with incredible powers (including x-ray vision and super strength). However, once he brings Astro Boy to life, Dr Tenma realizes the robot is no replacement for the son he lost. Astro Boy then leaves the floating Metro City and lands on a planet that desperately needs his help.

Highmore (The Spiderwick Chronicles, August Rush) admits he wasn't an Astro Boy fan prior to signing on to provide the voice of one of the most popular manga characters ever created. But at the film's LA press day, Highmore said he boned up on the comic books before starting work on Astro Boy. "[...]Definitely in preparation I flipped through a few of the manga comics. I didn’t get the '60s TV program or anything. I didn’t watch any of those, but definitely just the basis from where Astro Boy came from was really interesting."

Highmore says finding a way to relate to the heroic robot boy was a gradual, collaborative process with writer/director David Bowers. "He left it sort of quite open, I think, which is nice. It was something that we worked on. The character got built up as we went along, rather than sitting down at the start and making a list of all the things that he should be like. Obviously, when you’re doing a voice, there are lots of different versions of each take that you can do. It’s for him to choose in the end which one he thinks is really good," explained Highmore. "You come in with a few ideas and they perhaps don’t work out, but you give them a try anyway and see what works in the end. Also, it’s quite nice because you can do it all chronologically. You really get how he changes over time. Also you do it in a short amount of time as well, so you can get quite a lot done in a session and see how the character changes over those few minutes of the film."

Something Highmore also had to work on tackling was an American accent. "I’d done it a few times, the American accent on other films, so it wasn’t too tricky. Sometimes when you start with that, it can be quite restrictive. There’s only a certain amount of range, perhaps, in your voice that you can use it with because you have an idea of American that follows this pattern. You’ve got to learn, obviously with Astro Boy, to scream in American or whisper in a sort of American accent, which I think is a different skill rather than just speaking the whole time in the same accent. I think it went okay. I think the key is just to work on it beforehand and get sort of the noises all right. Then when you’re actually in the recording session just forget about it all and just think about the performance."

* * * * * * *

Astro Boy hits theaters on October 23, 2009 and is rated PG for some action and peril, and brief mild language.