The Daily Sports newspaper reports on Thursday that ravex, a new musical unit attached to the Avex label, will ship a special 18-minute Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atom/Mighty Atom) anime short with its debut album, trax, at the end of April. Tezuka Production is collaborating on this anime based on the robot boy created by the studio's namesake, manga and anime pioneer Osamu Tezuka. The anime short will be on a special extra DVD bundled with the trax album.
As "another story" set after the end of the original manga, this what-if "Return" plot depicts what happens to the title character after his final act to save Earth. After drifting in space, the robot boy is rescued by the three members of ravex, and he is miraculously revived - not by Tezuka's Black Jack surgeon character, but by "Space Jack." The newly evolved robot boy will be named "Ratom." The Princess Knight and other Tezuka characters will appear in this all-new story. Musical artists BoA, Maki Goto, Anna Tsuchiya, Tohoshinki, and TRF are contributing to the album, and an event is planned at Tokyo's National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation on April 10. The album marks Avex's 20th anniversary and what would have been Tezuka's 80th birthday.

From ANN