PLUTO

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA DramaPLUTO
OVA ActionBlack Jack
ANIME ActionTetsuwan Atom

REVIEWS

• 

  Godmeyer

  85/100
  A detective's journey through the cycle of hatred, and the innate desire for something real.

  "Pluto," the science fiction thriller, is an anime adaptation of Naoki Urasawa's manga and a retelling of Tezuka Osamu's "Astro boy." Urasawa is the man behind the critically acclaimed manga and anime "Monster," as well as the notable "20th Century Boys." This is a story with history and firm foundations, but there are more than just a few times when you can feel how dated it is. The futuristic world of Pluto is one still trying to pick itself up following "The 39th Central Asian Conflict," a brutal invasion of the Kingdom of Persia built upon a false report of weapons of mass destruction. The war has touched every family in one way or another and the characters we follow in Pluto were all central to the conflict itself. Some are human, but most are robots so technologically advanced that they cannot be telled apart. This world of controversial cohabitation between man and metal is thrown asunder as prominent pro-robot advocates are slain and the world's most loved robot, Mont Blanc, is killed. The central themes at the core of this story are revenge and inherited hatred. However, there is a great deal of time spent trying to pick apart what 'emotion' is as our robotic cast tries to become more human. This is a great framework for Pluto and it allows us to delve deep into the horrors that our incredible cast of characters were forced to endure during the war. We see how they've tried to move past all of the bloodshed that their picture-perfect memory won't allow them to forget, and we see the effects of the battlefield coming back to kill them in their new lives. While I think that the overall story trips and falls in a lot of aspects, I can truly say that I enjoyed every single one of these characters and the interactions that they brought about. While some were simple in appearance, they had an enjoyable depth that made you care about them and their fates. Carrying over Naoki Urasawa's unmistakable style into the anime, the art is incredibly unique. The character designs feel so fresh compared to the generic copy pastes that we see nowadays, and I will always welcome stuff like this when I see it. As well, we bounce around a lot in the story from Europe to the middle-east and Asia, and each region has a distinct atmosphere that was so thick you feel like you could grab it. Oppressive skyscrapers over Istanbul's intimate old-town, tiny villages atop futuristic mega-cities, war-torn Persia with cranes rebuilding the city. All of it is great, except the animation. Well, some of the time. Do not come into this expecting flashy battles that will blow your socks off. Its a slow mystery and most of the fighting is behind closed doors. However, the quality of the anime as a whole is fantastic when it doesn't lose itself in the CGI that likes to take over certain scenes. Its not too jarring and is only a fraction of the show, but it is worth mentioning. As well, the VAs in this show did a phenomenal job in both Japanese and in English. While I did think that there was more consistency in the Japanese voices, I loved hearing thick regional accents come through in the English and what I can I say, that's Netflix and their big budget casting for you. You could honestly watch it in either and it would not diminish the experience, much like "Cyberpunk: Edgerunners," a Netlflix-produced anime from last year. Overall, I think this show is well worth your time because its different. The mystery isn't sherlock-level but it keeps you invested as you try to pick up every breadcrumb of clues and world-building the story gives you. While I thought the ending was kind of Shonen-level generic, I think the journey our protagonist takes throughout it and the conversation surrounding human-connection and inherent-worth make this anime a must-watch. If you are a fan of the Blade Runner series, as I am, you will feel right at home.
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• 

  AquaLucas2

  65/100
  its like 2am rn

  I couldn't stop watching I was HOOKED... for a little while

  Ah Naoki Urasawa the mind behind Monster and 20th Century Boys got a new anime adaptation for his manga Pluto, a sorta kinda retelling of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy. You know good for him.

  In fact any author would love to get this level of attention given to their series, from what I've heard they've been working on this for quite a while. Which is why the series is so polished. All the characters are EXTREMELY on model which is weird to see in modern productions that go for more simpler designs. Urasawa's style is instantly recognizable even in faraway shots, but sometimes they go a little too hard with the black outlines. It sometimes clashes with the backgrounds which is why IMO the show looks better on 720p over 1080p but that's just me test it yourself. The backgrounds are given a lot of attention to detail, they render the retro-future style in stunning capacity with all the city shots. The one fault I could levy is the integration of CG elements which will almost always clash in a mainly 2D anime but any scene involving cockroaches made me want to not look at the screen. There's also some pretty cool cuts from Shinya Ohira, and as a sakuga nerd they were pretty fucking cool, I bet he got a good ass pay check. Hell I know people become sticklers over this but the dub is really good, I'd even call it definitive with the attention to detail in the accent of the voice cast, but that's neither here nor there watch what you want.

  I feel as more and more people watch this the discourse is going to become more suffocated around Urasawa's previous anime Monster so I'll get out all the major comparisons right now. The show is WAY faster, a lot of content is in those 8 episodes, which average around a third of monster's length. I mostly found that show to be a slog so this was a welcome change. The show plays with morality but mostly centered around the humanity of machines and the roles technology might play in our future, as opposed to the ideas around innate or nurtured evil like in Monster. But that's about it, the shows should not be in one another's conversations. Unless you want to I'm not the discourse police, I know it starts off as a mystery show but it veers far away from that genre as the show progresses.

  Now that point around Pluto demanding you entire attention, a lot of very vital characters are introduced very quickly and they shuffle around them very quickly from episode to episode.
  Gesicht, Atom, Epsilon, Uran, Dr.Tenma, Abra, and Adolf all become very key players in the plot, and it becomes very easy to get hooked into the mystery of Pluto in the first 2 thirds (when you get past that very lukewarm first episode). I mainly connected with Gesicht as there is an air of mystery pertaining to his character in relation to his memory and role as the detective for the Pluto case.

  Now ummm... the ending is kind of a clusterfuck but I can't get into that without spoiling so I'll leave all my gripes in the section below ok cool

  - So gesicht dies and the focus awkwardly shifts to Epsilon then atom its lame

  • so theres a bomb in the earth thats gonna blow up and pluto teams up with atom like he murdered all your friends dude wtf
  • "cycle of hatred" yeah we get it Scar from FMA did this WAY better and it was just a single character in a single show
  • the president has a serious geopolitical conversation with a teddy bear
  • characters like Brau-1589 dont do shit even though theyre cool and shouldve been more plot relevant (he's voiced by ProZD like come on)
  • Maybe I'm dumb or it's late but i don't understand why Abra wanted to make pluto i cant believe i have to go read the wiki on the main villian's motives
  • ngl all the desperate element of the show fail to coalesce into a proper conclusion, it kinda just feels like a bunch of red herrings until the final steven universe ass conclusion
    
    Edit I woke up it's like 10am I got my coffee and a little headache but i think I'm ready to expand a bit on why I didn't like the ending
    I think the show is sold as this political sci-fi cop drama with Gesicht being heavily focused, I know the entire time there are arcs within episodes about each robot's inner lives and the emotions they feel but I considered that to be more moral postulations around the narrative rather than the narrative itself. Atom being filled with billions of people then filled with hatred sounds like something out of Monster so I thought it would have a more complex outcome. You know make a statement with all these disparate elements and world building, but it kinda just took the easy route with the villain and the hero teaming up to defeat a last minute world ending threat that literally showed up in the last episode. It's hard for me to buy Atom becoming good cause he looked at a snail because we barely know him, he feels as relevant as Montblanc.

  I honestly hate how it took such an interesting hook with the pluto murders and basically did nothing with them, this isn't like a mystery where they connect the dots and follow leads no Pluto just comes to them and they all get picked off. I found a more compelling narrative around the murder of Adolf's brother and the false/removed memories of Gesicht. That's like a theme around robotics that is actually explored quite well, the idea of emotions and mimicry and memory that has stake in it's setting as Gesicht is the lead investigator on the Pluto case.

  Now Abra. I do think it's a little strange they just let him take Wassily to lure Epsilon into a fight with Pluto, do orphanages just give children away that fast? Really? But besides that his character amounts to hating Thracia for destroying his country and killing his family, but having a bunch of underlings complete his tasks for him via programing, the most special being Sahad who's pacifism is corrupted into the murderer Pluto to carry out his deeds. I can just imagine making Abra Pluto instead of involving Sahad as his narrative loses weight when he just sorta realize that Abra isn't really his actual dad but Goji with Abra's memories. In reality all of this was Dr.Tenma's fault for trying to make these super human intelligences, you could've just loaded his memories into a regular robot so you could get your colleague back instead of making a mass murderer, and he almost did it a second time with Atom like dude come on.

  From the added context I guess one could say the ending is more logical, as Pluto was just a proxy for Abra's bidding, but it basically alleviates any responsibility Sahad had in murdering those 7 robots. It also feels strange that the show alludes to the fact that other robots and people are just getting murdered BECAUSE of the string of Pluto cases with the horns, but are just dismissed as copycat cases. Even so people are still dying and that's worth exploring, introducing more varied perspectives into the work to like the anti-robot rights group that all look like KKK members. But they just sorta sideline those actors for a larger scale threat. I just think it took an actual discussion on the role technology will have in our future and the right of sentient life and the lasting effects of geopolitical warfare and just ended it with "guys can we all just get along :D"

  Yeah the more and more I think about this show the more I just sorta falls apart I don't know why there was so much hype around this show. But honestly I don't really care I watched it and thought it was mid, nothing more to that I guess.

  Yeah that's about all I have to say.

  If you enjoyed it, good for you.

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• 

  Ionliosite2

  40/100
  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, but 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 story arc, 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 focuses on a minor subplot about robot detective Gesicht investigating the murders knowing he could become a victim. 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 to an even greater degree than the original. While the original story feels rushed 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 beyond finding who Pluto is, an answer that seems self-fulfilling as the original never presents this as a question, so it at best works like Titanic in being a forgone conclusion.

  The reason Pluto reaches this level of overstuffing 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 screentime 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.

  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 waging 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 (nevermind 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 make 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 doesn’t have 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 given 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 very off, with the storm/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, 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

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