Bowers loves science fiction and robot and Godzilla movies, so he was thrilled to infuse Astro Boy with as much action as possible. "So it was somehow combining all of that -- and I live and breathe that kind of stuff."

As for the look, Bowers contends that it's not your typical CG-animated movie: "I think that production designer Samuel Michlap and art director Jake Rowell came up with the look of [sculptor] Noguchi for the shape and style of the buildings, and we looked at images of Mt. Fuji by Hokusai, which is represented by the mountain in Metro City. And I think it does have a unique look: we call it 'retro futurist.'

However, given the recession, there was a major setback to deal with when financing temporarily halted early this year and the L.A. studio in Sherman Oaks had to shut down. But Imagi in Hong Kong picked up the slack without a beat, according to Bowers.

Even though they weren't sure Astro Boy was going to get finished, investment came through and production resumed a month later in Hong Kong.

"Being an independent studio and struggling to find investment and investment being pulled out was extremely challenging," he relays. "We lost a lot of crew in L.A. and encouraged them to find other work. At one point, we weren't sure the movie was going to get finished, which would've been a tragedy because everyone really loved it. But investment did come through and the movie got up and running again. We managed to finish it. But it was a struggle -- it really was. It was very draining."

Especially since Astro Boy was forced to shut down production for a month. "But, again, I don't think the film feels compromised in any way. At the end of the day, we managed to do things just the way we wanted."

Among the crew who wasn't able to finish his stint was Jakob Jensen (Flushed Away), the animation director, who went back to DreamWorks to work on How to Train Your Dragon. But for him, it was all about staying true to the story, the universe and the lore.

"But as an animator, I think if you think too much about style, you might be missing the point," he suggests. "You also don't want to copy what's been done already and force something on a story just because it's staying true to the heritage. But, as an actor, staying true to the moment is the main challenge. My key point is simplicity. I'm a big fan of simplicity. And staying true to Tezuka' s vision is in that simplicity, which is inherent in that Japanese sensibility, I suppose. And that sensibility is shared amongst many of us animators in finding the core of a performance and boiling it down to poetics."

Learning how to use his jets never fails to thrill audiences.

Jensen echoes Bower's assessment of the Imagi crew: "They've obviously grown as artists and have evolved the [<Maya>-based] toolset. We injected our experiences from DreamWorks. Tim Cheung went to Hong Kong to oversee a lot of the technical issues. He implemented a lot of the workflow that you see at major studios: animation libraries and how to approach lip synch and how to streamline the process and make faces consistent from animator to animator. The funny thing is, I still consider myself a traditional animator, and it used to be one of the biggest challenges for a supervising animator to make sure the whole team stays on model. And, interestingly enough, it's still an issue even though you are given a puppet with all that technology offers to push and pull."

And what was most difficult to get right?