This is perhaps not the ideal way to experience Astro Boy.

A disclaimer: I have not read the original manga by Osamu Tezuka, nor watched anything of the anime, save for the first episode of the 1963 series. Therefore, I cannot really compare this remake by Akira Himekawa to other versions. What I can judge, however, is how this version stands on its own.

This feels like a very condensed version of the Astro Boy story. The pacing suffers from this, as everything happens so fast that the emotional punches don't really carry much weight. While the art is nice to look at, the paneling is often confusing to the point I can't understand what is happening, and a lot of the time the manga just feels like a montage of the original story.

As for the story, it's good. There are lots of philosophical questions asked about the future of AI and the rights of intelligent robots, and in many ways you can draw parallels between the robots as the working class and humans as the middle/upper class. If you look at it from another perspective, the relationship between the robots and the humans could be seen as a comment on immigration and racism. All this packed in a child friendly way, that hopefully gets children thinking about some more difficult questions. Too bad the story loses its punch with the condensed pacing.

All in all, I don't think this is the best way to experience Astro Boy. Still it is a short version of the story that won't take up much of your time, so if you just want to get the gist of the story without having to plough through 20+ volumes of the original, this one might do the trick.