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Astro Kid

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Not to be confused with Astro Boy.
Astro Kid
Film poster
FrenchTerra Willy, planète inconnue
Directed byÉric Tosti
Written byDavid Alaux [fr]
Éric Tosti
Jean-François Tosti
Produced byJean-François Tosti
Starring
Edited byJean-Christian Tiassy
Hélène Blanchard
Music byOliver Cussac[1]
Production
companies
Distributed byBAC Films
Release date
  • 5 April 2019 (2019-04-05)
Running time
90 minutes[2]
CountryFrance
LanguageFrench
Box office$4.3 million[3]

Astro Kid (French: Terra Willy, planète inconnue, lit. 'Terra Willy, unknown planet') is a 2019 French animated science-fiction film directed and written by Éric Tosti with the participation of the co-writers David Alaux and Jean-François Tosti. The plot concerns on a young boy named Willy, who after the destruction of his ship, gets separated from his parents and lands on an unexplored planet, where he must survive until the arrival of a rescue mission.[4][5]

Synopsis

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Following the destruction of their ship, a 10-year-old boy called Willy is separated from his parents with whom he traveled through space. His rescue capsule lands on a wild and unexplored planet. With the help of Buck, a survival robot, he will have to hold on until the arrival of a rescue mission. Meanwhile, they meet an eight legged lizard-like alien named Flash, with whom they become friends, and together they discover the planet, its fauna, its flora... but also its dangers.

Voice cast

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English Dub

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French Dub

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Production

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Terra Willy is the second feature film from the Toulouse-based studio TAT Productions to be released in theatres,[clarification needed] after The Jungle Bunch. Shortly after his previous film release in July 2017, TAT announced its production of Astro Kid with a team of 70 people and having a budget of €6 million.

The movie was animated using 3ds Max and rendered using VRay. Some of the render tests had used Substance Designer on their own for textures, and the team decided to go for 3ds Max pipeline, mainly based on the most common plugins like Ornatrix and Forest. However, the studio only have three developers for internal tools that are mostly used for plugging any holes in the usage design of the forest planet to use UDIMs for the first time, with Substance Painter being adapted into a new way of working and resulting in load all the UDIMs and be able to bake all the maps in one place alongside UV and surfacing on ZBrush to later being exported to Autodesk software alongside materials for the hard surfacing, for metals, paints, plastics, rubbers and background props modeling department.

Reception

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The film received generally positive reviews from critics,[5][6] and on Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 100% from 11 reviews.[7]

Tom Cassidy of Common Sense Media gave the film four stars out of five, saying "an animated alien adventure has learning, empathy, teamwork."[8] Leslie Felperin of The Guardian give a rate of the film three stars out of five, saying that the animation is "fluent and densely rendered, although sometimes the characters have less subtlety than their surrounding environment. But, compared with the relentlessly noisy animated features coming out of Hollywood, this is refreshingly old-school and innocent." He also noted that the film is "meant to teach kids about self-reliance, cooperation, the value of outdoor adventure and risk-taking; and the obligatory environmental sentimentalism is also present and correct."[5] Larushka Ivan-Zadeh of The Times rated the film also three stars out of five, stating that the film has "a neat underlying message about how children, forcibly unplugged from technology and overprotective parents, will survive and thrive." She also said that the film's narrative has "heart-tugging boy-and-dog tale lacks in [it's] momentum, it makes up for in wondrous diversion."[6] Starburst Magazine's Laura Griffiths rated the film six out of ten, writing that the film's animation is "wonderful and the environments which Director Éric Tosti and co. have created offer an exciting Technicolor landscape of weird and wonderful wildlife." Though, she also wrote that the voice acting is a "tad iffy," but overall, she concluded "a good story of survival with plenty of fun moments along the way."[9]

A year later, Sandra Hall of The Sydney Morning Herald gave the film a rate of 3½ stars, saying that "a film crafted expressly for small children, but it has subtleties."[10]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Toulouse. Olivier Cussac, as de la musique de film, 11 July 2018. ladepeche.fr. Retrieved 13 March 2021. (in French)
  2. ^ Astro Kid at the British Board of Film Classification. bbfc.co.uk. Retrieved 13 March 2021.
  3. ^ Astro Kid at Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 13 March 2021.
  4. ^ ""Terra Willy", le petit frère des "As de la jungle" en gestation à Toulouse". Franceinfo (in French). 1 June 2018. Retrieved 13 March 2021.
  5. ^ a b c Felperin, Leslie (21 August 2019). "Astro Kid review – little boy lost on a planet far far away". The Guardian.
  6. ^ a b Ivan-Zadeh, Larushka (23 August 2019). "Astro Kid review — lost in space with only a red robot to hear you scream". The Times. Retrieved 13 March 2021.
  7. ^ "Terra Willy". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango. Retrieved 30 October 2021.
  8. ^ Cassidy, Tom. "Terra Willy Movie Review". Common Sense Media. Retrieved 19 April 2024.
  9. ^ Griffiths, Laura. "ASTRO KID". Starburst Magazine. Retrieved 14 September 2024.
  10. ^ Hall, Sandra (23 September 2020). "Astro Kid's space jaunt is an engaging journey". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 14 September 2024.
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