This thoroughly Americanised CGI feature film of Osamu Tezuka’s seminal 1950s manga is an effic­iently zingy production that should keep kids enrapt throughout. Its subject is that traditional child-pleaser, good vs evil and an outsider’s search for acceptance. In this case, our hero is a boy-robot, rejected by his dad, who has to figure out how he fits into a world divided between humans and their robot slaves and save it from a monster-bot on the rampage. The action’s split between a gleaming metropolis floating in the sky, and a robot junkyard Earth below, where Astro Boy falls in with a gang of scavenging orphans.

Despite its 1950s preoccup­ations, Astro Boy doesn’t feel dated, perhaps largely due to what has become a standardised look, plot shape and set of character types across US animated children’s feat­ures. It shares such films’ reliance on ‘big name’ voices, most jarringly here with the unlikely casting of Bill Nighy as a plump, idealistic scientist, but refrains from over-their-heads witticisms, addressing itself directly to its target audience with simply colour-coded good (blue) and evil (red) and humour of the slapstick variety. It’s slickly crafted entertainment, but like its hero it has robotic armature under its personable skin.