Ah Dreamworks, will you never learn? While rivals Pixar continue to leap ahead of the pack with sky high concepts and sublime characterisation, Dreamworks seems satisfied to churn out slapstick/Scottish accent mash-ups that – ahem – drag on…

To be fair, How to Train your Dragon is a visually arresting diversion with some lovely moments, but the mile high benchmarks set by the likes of Up! Will unfortunately always leave this trailing sadly behind and appearing…well, just too damn cartoonish to compete.

Based on Cressida Cowell’s children’s novel, we’re transported to the mythical land of Berk, a Noggin The Nog setting with manly Vikings refusing to up sticks despite the almost constant, fire-breathing attention of the titular scaly beasts, while Chief’s son Hiccup takes dragon-slaying lessons to win the respect of his father ( a superbly cast Gerard Butler). Typically, things soon go awry as Hiccup can’t quite bring himself to kill anything, instead nursing an injured dragon back to health as we stumble innocuously into one boy and his dog territory.

Unfortunately it’s not only innocuous –it also veers dangerously into boring territory. Even at under a hundred minutes the pace drags, shown in a harsh light against some truly breath-taking 3D flight and fight sequences.

Meanwhile the oddly Scottish Vikings run around shouting, fall over and look goofily at camera as the writers run out of things to say and fill the gaps with bucket-on-head clowning. The novel may be brisk, but surely there was enough material to fill out such a short running time? The result is an uneven adaptation that will leave younger children fidgeting at the lumpen ‘comedy’and adults glumly checking their watches.

It’s a shame that what could have been a genuinely entertaining concept is instead delivered as a missed opportunity, Dreamworks providing some superlative animation but missing the razor-honed wit of their rivals.

We all know the best part of the X-Men movies was when Wolverine stuck his in-built kebab skewers through some moron in a cape, so the thought of Hugh Jackman becoming a sort of Robocop/Rocky hybrid is pretty alluring.

Jackman has signed up for Dreamworks’ Real Steel, playing a futuristic pugilist who teams up with an unbeatable mystery robot for some iron-on-iron ring action, not to mention – this being Dreamworks – some father/son bonding.

The director (Night at the Museum’s Shawn Levy) unfortunately leads us to believe this will be more cutesy family Rock ‘ em Sock ‘em Robots than Robot Jox, but hey, low tech automated smackdowns are always good for a few yuks so fingers crossed!

If there’s one lesson we can learn from the movies, it’s never replace your dead son with a robot copy. While Astro Boy’s dad Dr.Tenma (Nic Cage) has to learn this the hard way, it’s a blessing for the rest of us as we get to catch up with 40-plus years of Japanimation in a movie that may struggle on plot, but is so eyeball meltingly gorgeous you won’t hold a grudge.

It’s the near future; where the Earth has yet again become a smouldering garbage dump. Luckily a few big brains have gotten together and become enlightened – quite literally – by blasting a huge chunk of planet into the sky. Up where the air is clear the privileged citizens live a life free of drudgery, serviced by Dr.Tenma’s robots. Unfortunately, the good doctor is so wrapped up in his work, he has little time for son Tobey – until Tobey is tragically lost, prompting the grief stricken scientist to create the eponymous Astro Boy.

It’s actually a brilliantly dark conceit, with Tenma struggling with his feelings of guilt and loss, even as he preps Astro to save the world, and it’s this underlying current that holds the whole thing together. In addition Dreamworks Animation has put together some breathtaking visuals, and the cast is top-shelf, delivering some great, empathetic performances that hint at more than one childhood being spent soaking up Saturday morning cartoon shows.

Unfortunately things do occasionally fall flat. It’s clear that Summit have great faith in Director David Bowers, who also gets a co-writers credit. Unfortunately he’s made the dangerous decision to ground things in current affairs, and the sub plot, with Donald Sutherland’s general using an unstable war machine to defeat a non-existent threat is a heavy handed attempt at tackling contemporary issues that constantly threatens to undermine the narrative, attempting to bridge the gap between children’s film and adult movie and swinging dangerously close to collapsing.

That said, there are some lovely moments to be had, Astro’s awakening and the dawning realisation that he’s not a real boy but a high-tech Pinocchio are evocative and affecting, and Tenma’s emotional see-sawing is handled with an uncommon delicacy. It’s a shame that the action sequences, while good looking, are ultimately shallow and disappointing.

In attempting to modernise the source material, Bowers takes an ultimately ill-judged step, as this works best when sticking close to the densely plotted family drama of Tezuka’s books, with new material ultimately feeling derivative, and far more worthy of a cheap TV cartoon than a multi-million dollar blockbuster.

Bizarrely enough, this is a CGI blockbuster starring an atomic robot that would work better as a gentle drama. When it works, it works beautifully, and it’s worth catching on the big screen just to revel in the incredibly evocative, retro-futuristic backgrounds and marvellously rendered characters.

A visual triumph, if not a dramatic one, and a world that begs to be explored more deeply.