(Annecy) Pop culture icon, the little robot Astro Boy, created by Japanese manga author Osamu Tezuka, will soon be back in a new series of cartoons, 40 years after the one that fascinated children around the world , the producers announced Thursday.
Posted at 2:08 p.m.
Co-produced by Mediawan, a heavyweight in audiovisual production, and Shibuya Productions, this series entitled Astro Boy Reboot will have 52 episodes of 26 minutes. It will be directed by Thomas Astruc, creator of another successful animated series, Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir.
The announcement was made as part of the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, which runs until Saturday.
“I don’t have the words to express how much Osamu Tezuka has influenced my life and my work. Astro Boy is a cult series that has anticipated the future like no other work has done,” rejoiced Thomas Astruc in the production press release.
Astro Boy (or in French Astro, the little robot) is the best-known work of Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989) and a manga classic.
Created at the beginning of the 1950s, this series has as its hero a small rectifying robot with a child’s physique, big laughing eyes, brown powder puff and red boots capable of transforming into reactors.
Astro was the subject of several television cartoon series beginning in the 1960s, one of which aired worldwide in the 1980s.
In 2018, an extremely rare board ofAstro Boy had been sold at auction in Paris for the record price of 269,400 euros ($37,000), five times the estimated amount.