Sporting crimson rocket-powered boots, trademark black underpants, perky quiff and buttock-mounted machine guns, the vital elements of Japan's most famous cartoon icon all appear to be in place.

But there is one serious difference: this incarnation of Astro Boy - set for worldwide cinema release by Warner Brothers next year - is made in Hong Kong. This has sparked a wave of panic throughout Japan's creaking animation industry: why has Japan's most recognisable cartoon character - the work of Osamu Tezuka, the “father of Japanese animation” - fallen into foreign hands?

The made-in-Hong Kong Astro Boy is neither a fake nor inauthentic to Mr Tezuka's original design nor the simple outcome of cheap outsourcing to China. It is, however, clear evidence that Japan is losing its grip on the $30billion (£15.3billion) anime industry it once shaped and dominated.

Hong Kong, meanwhile, is preparing to step into the limelight as the engine of Asian computer-generated imagery (CGI) animation and not merely because movie production costs a third of what it would in California. Hong Kong, unlike Japan, has an unlimited supply of young, creative and technologically literate people ready to turn the island into an animation hub.

Douglas Glen, the chief executive of the studio making Astro Boy, believes that Hong Kong has all the elements it needs to do so. He says: “I want to be able to say: 'Give that scene a Miyazaki look' or 'Make him react like Fred Flintstone would', and the animators in Hong Kong get it. It is one of the few places in the world where people have a truly international entertainment background.”

It is, he suggests, this more international outlook that sets Hong Kong apart from Japan, which accounts for 60 per cent of all animation shown on television around the world.

Underlying Hong Kong's effort to become Hollywood's animation satellite in the East is a better sense of how intellectual property can be leveraged into global success. Japan, despite the worldwide success of its animations, video games and toys, has routinely ignored international opportunities and missed enormously lucrative cash cows of the sort that Mr Glen is now keen to milk.

He says: “The Japanese creative process has never generated anything more than what it knows will be big in Japan. If it happened to work in the outside world, it was never on purpose. In Hollywood, meanwhile, the creative process is very intentional and very methodical. There is a difference of perception, too.

The US assumes that if it is made in the US, everyone will like it. The Japanese assume that the rest of the world will never understand something made in Japan. Both are wrong.”

The production of Astro Boy highlights the multiple failings of the Japanese animation industry. The most striking difference is that the new Astro Boy uses entirely computer-

generated imagery - an industrial shift that still eludes many of the greatest Japanese animation houses.

Imagi, the studio that is making Astro Boy into a movie, is the largest and most advanced CGI production house in Asia and has technologies that rival Pixar and DreamWorks. Among Japan's hundreds of anime studios, most say that they want to move production of both new material and back catalogue to CGI, but that they lack the finances to do so.

Financial sophistication also sets Imagi apart from many domestic rivals. Production of Astro Boy is in large part financed by private equity investors and the placement last year of $52 million in convertible bonds, a fundraising exercise beyond even most listed Japanese animation houses.

Imagi has also bought the rights to Gatchaman, a giant anime hit from the Japanese back catalogue that reached British screens as Battle of the Planets three decades ago. It is scheduled for release next year.

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