"I hope people give it a chance. Because if people give it a chance they'll like it," says director David Bowers about his new animation, "Astro Boy" (titled "Atom" in domestic release), in a room at the Park Hyatt hotel in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo.

The movie is the first big-screen adaptation of the famous serialized manga penned by Japan's "god of manga," Osamu Tezuka, between 1952 and 1968, and it opened here in Japan last Saturday.

"It's a new version of Atom," Bowers explains. "I updated Atom a little bit. I talked to Makoto-san (the son of Osamu Tezuka and one of the owners of Tezuka Productions) and we changed it slightly. It's a little more psychological."