Pluto

Pluto is a mature adaptation of one of the most iconic arcs of Astro Boy. The manga, by the same name, is widely considered a masterpiece and is a deep passion project for the writer. I want to keep this mostly spoiler-free. I would highly recommend going into this blind, and if you love Seinen anime/manga, you will have an absolute blast here. Pluto comprises some of the most well-written and heartfelt characters whose story reaches a perfect end. Every single character from the original arc in Astro Boy has been given justice in this remake. Atom (Astro Boy Himself) and Gesicht are the mainleads of this show and both of them never fail to keep me engaged. The suspense is all very well done and the conclusion to it all is personally among my favorite endings in fiction. Pluto, isn’t just any story focusing on humans and robots, it is THE story focusing on humans and robots. Going into Pluto I knew we would get a brilliant adaptation because the project was led by Masao Maruyama. He founded Madhouse and MAPPA, who specifically founded this new studio to adapt extremely well-deserving and overlooked mangas akin to Pluto. The animation is stellar for the most part, but at times some special effects don’t go too well and make the scene look weirdly blurry. Overall, they have done justice to the source material and it is as good of an adaptation as any fan could’ve asked for, 10/10. Moreover, some of the other masterpieces he produced are Monster, Perfect Blue, Death Note, Hunter x Hunter (2011), Nana, Trigun, Hellsing Ultimate, Paprika, Kids on the Slope, and Tokyo Godfathers, among many others, the guy has been the driving force for masterpieces left and right. Also, the music composition is being done by Yuugo Kanno, who is well known for his extremely popular JoJo opening themes. The Mangaka Naoki Urasawa is well known for his genius in developing murder mysteries or suspenseful tales that get increasingly interesting as you read. He has genuinely created some of the most masterful stuff in modern entertainment, and to finally see this manga by him get such a phenomenal and passionate adaptation feels so good; I waited for so long to get one. I hope that Pluto is successful enough that we get one for 20th Century Boys, which is another manga by Urasawa.

Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto – A Post-Mortem I know most people who watched this show probably don’t care about this detail, but it’s one that I’m going to use a lot in this review, so I’ll get it as a starting point: Pluto isn’t just based on the manga of the same name by Monster’s author Naoki Urasawa, it’s also a remake of the “Greatest Robot in the World” arc from the Astro Boy manga by “God of Manga” Osamu Tezuka. Because of this, I’m going to compare Pluto to its original material a lot, as while I believe there’s aspects it improved from the classic storyarc, it mostly doesn’t reach its level. From the most obvious difference between both stories, Astro Boy focuses on Pluto going to challenge the seven most advanced robots in the world one by one to claim himself the greatest robot in the world, almost in a tournament arc kind of vibe, while Pluto moves the focus away from the action and instead delves on a minor subplot about robot detective Gesicht investigating the murders knowing he could become a victim of them. Because of this, I’m not going to compare the stories, as they’re completely unrelated, and thus judge purely the fact that Pluto tries too much in too little time to an even greater degree than the original. While the original story feels rushed for the first part until reaching a more natural flow in the latter part, Pluto has so many subplots and side characters all happening at the same time that it’s very hard to tell what even is the point of it all beyond finding who Pluto is (an answer that at best works like Titanic in being a forgone conclusion), with characters coming in and out with no rhyme or reason. The reason Pluto reaches this level of over-stuffing is actually pretty simple: the other six robots that serve as Pluto’s targets have little character in the original arc, with only Epsilon having a full character, the rest are mostly one-note traits. To amend this, Pluto places heavy focus on them, with Gesicht straight up replacing Astro as the protagonist, so you have large amounts of screen time dedicated to developing doomed characters. Indeed, Pluto can be described as “the cryporn of the hour”, as every episode puts a lot of effort into making you feel for a character who’s going to die, something that didn’t affect Urasawa’s manga as there was a greater gap of time between each death, and of course doesn’t affect Tezuka’s because he didn’t try to get emotional response of every single character who died. Speaking of emotions, the themes in Pluto and Astro Boy for this story are something I want to address, as Astro Boy simply comes across as having more mature and meaningful ideas despite being the version aimed at kids. The original is an anti-war story, dealing with the sorrow of soldiers who’re forced to wage war against their will, as well commentary on how technology that could be to help people is being misused for power hungry goals, both reflected allegorically on the challenges posed by Pluto towards the seven most advanced robots. Pluto isn’t that, instead seems to ironically enough be written by a robot who has no idea about human emotions, because it posits the thesis that hatred is the source of all human evil and that we need to erase it in order to reach a better world. Anyone who’s actually human can tell the issue here: hatred is a part of human nature, you can’t “cure” it, and acting as if that was possible is incredibly childish. On that note, I want Urasawa to share with me the computer code for hatred, as apparently, it’s something that can be programmed into machines here (never mind the fact they explicitly say early on that not even Astro’s immensely advanced AI is still only imitating human feelings rather than actually having it as presented later). Now I may be coming across as very negative here, but there’s one aspect of Pluto I really want to praise: the characters. As said before, Tezuka doesn’t actually develop five of the most advanced robots in the world beyond one-notes, and that’s the part where this series actually surpasses Astro Boy. Gesicht appears for a whole of 2 scenes in the original, so of course he’s massively expanded compared to his counterpart and made into a compelling figure, all while maintaining his original presentation intact, a feat I’ll openly praise given how hard that must’ve been. The two characters that already had a lot of material to work with, Astro and Epsilon, are mostly left intact, as there’s really no need to do anything with them but what Tezuka set, but everyone else from the group who didn’t gets a glow up that helps make the cast far livelier and more memorable than the original, with each having its own story, personality and goals clearly set here. The only characters Urasawa fails with are Pluto himself, ironic considering he was the most developed of the original and this new version is named after him, as he loses almost everything that made him interesting and relevant to the story’s themes in favor of more cryporn, and Bora, mostly because of the reasons explained on how he missed the themes of the original meaning he’s filler now. Mostly unrelated note: There's this incredibly contrived scene where a kid is inexplicably surrounded by tigers and lions, who just stare at him until Uran calls them away, and they just seem to understand her somehow and it's all solved with no further mention, which I have no idea how to take as there’s no explanation how she can do this given how much focus is taken away from her here. An aspect of this anime that makes me split is the visual department, and I’m going to touch both sides of the issue there. The traditional art is nothing short of great, being always on-model, detailed and fluid, all of which are so rare to find in modern anime, I’d have to conjure something from the OVA era like Macross Plus to compare how well it looks. And just like Plus, the actual issue with Pluto is the digital aspect, not just the CGI, but everything that would normally belong the digital processing like the effects look off, with the storms/tornadoes Pluto creates being a particularly jarring example given we also see a traditionally animated one in the show that doesn’t look like a PS2 monstrosity, and that’s not even getting when the backgrounds become the digital and the characters look photoshopped over them. Reading Twitter comments from an animator who worked on the series before COVID, they explained that all these effects were added without him and the other animators knowing, which explains why the entire show looks like it was handled by two completely different teams, because it was. Also, while I’m not a fan of Urasawa’s character designs (the only characters that have designs escaping his trappings are the ones who are modernized versions of Tezuka characters), I can respect his art, and having cross checked the manga as I watched the anime, I can firmly say they screwed what looked good in his manga with this anime. In general, I think that Pluto is a good remake, as it expands greatly on the weakest aspect of the source it’s taking, but it fails to work as a standalone story, as its themes are weak and the story is so padded beyond what it needs to, both are which are issues plaguing his previous work Monster as well, but hey, this is still much more tolerable than that one. Also, I know this is a nitpick, but why does every translation of this series I can find call Astro by his Japanese name Atom? Seems like a weird attempt to try to distance yourself from the most important anime ever made. Thank you for reading

Beautifully animated utter nonsense. Make no mistake, I absolutely enjoy many of the themes "Pluto" spends much of its runtime on. The "humanity" of robots, the meaning of "family", the vicious cycle of hatred - the show (and likely the original manga) has a lot of interesting things to say about them, and if you can turn off your brain (not unlike how the robots in the show can take out their "artificial intelligence" units from their bodies), you can definitely enjoy what it has to offer. The gorgeous visuals certainly help as well. Unfortunately, the show requires way more willing suspension of disbelief than I cangive it, to the point that I feel that its writing is an insult towards the viewers' intelligence. The plot doesn't really advance - instead, "things happen", then some other "things happen", and finally the show just stops. (No, seriously, the ending is jarringly abrupt.) There are a few interesting twists here and there, but they feel utterly unearned, because the events leading up to them tend to seem so incoherent and nonsensical. Many of the characters' decisions make no sense, or go against what has been revealed to them mere minutes ago. Everything is subordinated to "where the story needs to go", regardless of whether that direction fits what's been established about the characters or the setting. And sadly, this only gets worse the closer we get to the end. Many people here seem ecstatic because of the visuals and the overall "hate is bad" message, but I think this show would have worked so much better if there was an actual, working plot to underpin it all. Such a good-looking, meaningful series deserved better than this.

So, I took several days to cool down and now I'm ready to talk about Pluto calmly. I'll preface it with my thoughts on Urasawa. I've read 20th and 21st Century Boys and watched Monster. I had problems with all of it. Generally speaking, I don't like how unfocused his story can get, how some characters get enough development to become proper characters but not enough to do anything worthwhile with them. Most of his stories could be significantly trimmed down to focus on what matters. The degrees to which these problems manifest themselves in his works vary a lot as well. There is alsoa question of realism and plot holes. Urasawa writes stories that want to be taken seriously but all of them have elements that rip you out of the story, be it military personel not shooting a terrorist because he is is playing his guitar really well, a pregnant woman about to give birth climbing through ventilation shafts and over fences or a robot dog having a hearbeat. However, despite my problems with Monster and 20th Century Boys, they both have something to offer. 20th Century Boys has good character chemistry and a generally interesting story with nice atmosphere (until 21st Century Boys ruins most of it) and the art is pretty good as well. Monster has some phylosophical questions that, while not perfectly explored or presented, are interesting and the character of Johan is... Well, a double edged sword as he is is the biggest selling point and the biggest problem of Monster. Pluto though... Pluto has all the problems of Urasawa's writing in one messy package. There are no plot holes, there are plot craters. The whole technical aspect of the show is utterly nonsensical. Watching it made me angry. Despite Pluto being 8 hours it barely develops any characters beyond the basics. The story is simple and would've been enough in some battle shounen but is woefully basic and unfit for a show (I haven't read the manga, I'm only talking about the adaptation) like Pluto that is trying to be something serious, intellectual and profound. Pluto could've told a story of robots and humans, of how artificial differs from real or how close they can get, of what it means to be human, it could've been filled with political intrigue, sharp twists and mystery, instead Pluto does a bit of everything which amounts to nothing in the end. It has one main message of "Hatred is bad", barely any interesting characters, no intrigue, no logic, no point. And I have to mention that I was gonna give it a 6 but the last episode was such a dumpster fire I had to lower it. I wanted it to be over with so bad and it ended so unceremoniously I literally went "That's it?". Long story short, Pluto is a waste of potential, animation and setting. The only value it has is production value. I would only recommend it to people who can "turn their brains off" while watching.