Astro Kid

Production

Astro Kid is the second theatrical feature from the Toulouse-based studio TAT Productions, following The Jungle Bunch. The studio announced production shortly after the July 2017 release of its previous film, with a team of 70 people and a budget of €6 million. The animation was created using 3ds Max and rendered with VRay. Render tests employed Substance Designer for textures.

The team used the 3ds Max pipeline due to common plugins like Ornatrix and Forest. Only three developers handled internal tools, primarily to address design gaps for the forest planet and to implement UDIMs for the first time. Substance Painter was used in a new workflow that loaded all UDIMs and baked maps in one place alongside UV and surfacing in ZBrush. These were then exported to Autodesk software with materials for hard surfacing, metals, paints, plastics, rubbers, and background props modelling.

Reception

The film received generally positive reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, it holds an approval rating from a number of reviews. Tom Cassidy of Common Sense Media gave four stars out of five, calling it "an animated alien adventure has learning, empathy, teamwork." Leslie Felperin of The Guardian rated it three stars out of five, noting the animation is "fluent and densely rendered, although sometimes the characters have less subtlety than their surrounding environment" and that it is "refreshingly old-school and innocent" compared to Hollywood features.

Felperin added the film is "meant to teach kids about self-reliance, cooperation, the value of outdoor adventure and risk-taking." Larushka Ivan-Zadeh of The Times also gave three stars out of five, stating the film has "a neat underlying message about how children, forcibly unplugged from technology and overprotective parents, will survive and thrive" and that its narrative "lacks in [its] momentum, it makes up for in wondrous diversion." Laura Griffiths of Starburst Magazine rated it six out of ten, praising the animation as "wonderful" and the environments as "an exciting Technicolor landscape," though she found the voice acting "a tad iffy," concluding it is "a good story of survival with plenty of fun moments."

A year later, Sandra Hall of The Sydney Morning Herald gave three and a half stars, saying it is "a film crafted expressly for small children, but it has subtleties."