Astro Boy Character Analysis

In Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy series, there are many scenes where violence is inflicted upon either a machine or human character. Oftentimes the character escapes without a scratch, due to the “elastic” nature of physics in the manga format. However Astro Boy shows a clear divide between the impact of violence as well as the methods of recovery for humans and machines. Throughout Astro Boy, Tezuka Osamu shows that even though machine bodies are stronger, sturdier and repairable, human bodies are more resilient and adaptable; this leads to the implication that a posthumanist cybernetic world would see machines and humans as equal complements, rather than one group being strictly superior to the other. The first of many scenes that stands out throughout Astro Boy occurs on pages 72 – 73 of Volume II, in the …show more content…
When considering the neural networks of human and machines throughout Astro Boy, it is clear Tezuka depicts robots as the more logical of the two, yet still the ones easiest to alter. The scene on page 59 of Volume II shows the psychophysiological aspect of destructibility well, when Deadcross replaces President Rag’s brain with him own control device. In one fell swoop Deadcross takes away all identity from Rag, turning him into a puppet. Human, or specifically biological beings, have a much more indestructible psychophysiological state. On page 113 of Astro Boy Volume I, in the story “The Hot Dog Corps”, Astro, Mustachio, and Ochanomizu discover that #44 is actually Mustachio’s dog Pero, whose nervous system was transferred into a robotics body. Unlike Rag, #44 never lost his identity, and even retained the natural instinct of the dog to return home to its owner. Psychophysiologically, the robot’s identity is directly influenced by the body, however the biological organism’s identity is rooted in something internal and