Astro Boy: Space Hero & Jungle Emperor Leo: The Movie Blu-ray Digital Remaster Edition

Timeless masterpieces of Tezuka animation, presented alongside rare footage from NHK.

The feature-length Jungle Emperor Leo film released in 1966 has been digitally remastered. Astro Boy: Space Hero, originally released in 1964 in a mixture of black-and-white and colour, has been restored with AI technology to create an entirely full-colour digital remaster.

Astro Boy was Japan's first weekly television anime series. For Astro Boy: Space Hero, Osamu Tezuka insisted that simply projecting the television programme onto a cinema screen would not be acceptable. New animation was added to the opening, the bridges between episodes and scenes within the episodes, reshaping the series into a feature film. The television broadcasts had been in black and white, so this landmark film gave children their first encounter with Astro Boy in vivid colour on the big screen.

Jungle Emperor Leo: The Movie reshapes the self-contained episodes of the television series into a substantial feature-length drama, bringing the message of the original manga into sharper focus.

Astro Boy: Space Hero takes place in the year 2004. Earth's science has advanced so far that messages are being sent to extraterrestrials, and robots make up half of the city's population. Astro Boy, the world's most advanced robot, works tirelessly at its centre. The Ministry of Science develops a robot spacecraft, formed when numerous component robots with electronic brains combine under Astro Boy's leadership. Colonel Vega, commander of an artificial island, kidnaps one of its component robots in pursuit of world domination, but Astro Boy thwarts his interference. When Dr Ochanomizu travels to the moon aboard the spacecraft, however, a mysterious monster abducts him.

In Jungle Emperor Leo: The Movie, Panja, the jungle's lion king, dies in a trap set by humans. His captured wife Eliza gives birth to Leo aboard a transport ship. Determined to carry on his father's wishes, Leo leaps into the sea and heads for Africa. Through kindness and wisdom, he wins the recognition of the jungle's animals. Then ferocious creatures feared as bringers of death appear...