So...I've watched a lot of anime over the course of my life. A lot. Yet it was only in 2023 that I actually managed to finish something made by the very well known mangaka Naoki Urasawa. I know, I'm super late to the party on this one. Whether you're familiar with his work or not, Urasawa is well known for his realistic character designs and his often long manga prominently featuring adult characters and heavy themes, standing out against the typical anime/manga designs and stories that were common during the 90s and early 2000s. Three of his most famous manga are Monster, 20th Century Boys, and the subject of today's review, Pluto. Urasawa mentioned that the works of Osamu Tezuka were the first manga he ever read, with one particular arc in Astro Boy, titled "The Greatest Robot on Earth" becoming the impetus for his creation of Pluto, which is bascially a long, expanded adaptation of said arc done in his own style (As mandated by Tezuka's son Makoto, who insisted that he not imitate his father's style for the sake of making it stand on its own and not simply be a rehash of Astro Boy) and elaborating on its themes and most of its characters, with help from his colleague Takashi Nagasaki. Of course, he had to get permission from Tezuka's estate to even be allowed to do it, so you may as well consider Pluto an officially sanctioned Astro Boy fan fiction in comic form. In 2017, it was announced that Pluto would be getting an anime...though no new information about it would be revealed until several years later. Finally, the anime dropped on Netflix in November of 2023, six years after its initial reveal. I think the wait was well worth it, as while the Pluto anime doesn't quite help the manga transition from book to screen, it's a pretty damn good anime. I dare say it may as well be the best anime of 2023 thus far.

In a far off future where technology has made marvelous advances, humans and robots coexist, but not always in peace. One day, news breaks about one of the most famous robots in the world being brutally murdered, the killer unknown. Europol robot detective Gesicht attempts to solve this strange case that evolves into a string of robot and human deaths around the world where all the victims have objects shoved into or positioned by their heads, imitating horns. The case becomes more puzzling when evidence suggests a robot is responsible for the murders, which would make it the first time a robot has killed a human in eight years. All seven of the great robots of the world—the most scientifically advanced, which have the potential to become weapons of mass destruction, which includes Gesicht himself—seem to be the killer's targets, and the murdered humans are connected to preserving the International Robot Laws which grant robots equal rights. Can the murderer be brought to justice before its too late?

Funny thing you should know before watching this: Every single episode is an hour long. Not even kidding. I'm not sure what prompted the producers to make this decision, whether it was executive mandate from above or something they themselves decided on, but you can't say that the producers didn't make as much use of the time they had with this show. Seeing as the original manga is 8 volumes long, the producers did all they could to fit as much of the manga's material into 8 one-hour-long episodes, and from what I've heard, Urasawa himself was very much involved in the process. The animation remains true to Urasawa's style, favoring realism over exaggeration, though compared to the anime for Monster, Pluto has a much more bright, diverse color palette brought to life by modern technology. CGI is used whenever it's necessary, usually for the robot vehicles, though the times when its used for things like tornadoes and weather patterns do clash with the 2D animation quite a bit. The actual animation is great, really coming to life when it really calls for it, such as during the fight scenes, or for smaller things like the scene with Atom putting a snail on a bush. I do feel like the anime could have stood to be more experimental with its storyboarding and compositing, but more on that later. I don't have as much to say on Yugo Kanno's soundtrack, but it does its job very well, and since Pluto has no opening or ending songs, it doesn't make much of an impression. I will say that Yugo Kanno really seems to like using the bass, as I heard a ton of basslines a LOT throughout the series.

Seeing as Pluto is basically a gigantic expansion of the "Greatest Robot on Earth" arc from Astro Boy, Urasawa basically went all in on fleshing out every character possible, giving them much more personality, backstory, motivations, and depth that they didn't have in the original. In Astro Boy, Gesicht was just a one-off robot who gets killed the second he's introduced, as was all the other one-off robots shown off in that arc. Here, Gesicht is the main character, with Atom mainly being relegated to the secondary main character, and he's taken out of commission for a good chunk of his screentime. Every character, from the main players to even the side characters, is given ample time to develop beyond their established archetypes, and all are given human motivations for why they do what they do, making the audience actually want to care about them and get invested in their plight. This even extends to the primary villains, exploring that bigotry doesn't just come from nothing. The fact that most of the characters are adults makes this better because you won't get your usual dumb teenaged shenanigans that are so prevalent in anime, and since every adult character is a professional, there's a lot of time spent on researching, preparing, and investigating, making everything they do feel much more believable, even in the context of a heavy sci-fi setting. Considering the fact that the producers for the anime had a short time frame to work with, I do think they did a good job of adapting the characters to the screen and keeping everything that makes them work in tact. I will say one thing: As someone who watched the 1980 Astro Boy anime and hated Uran because of how much of an annoying brat she was there, I am so happy Pluto toned her down and made her much more tolerable while still keeping her core character. Pluto's Uran is best Uran in my book.

But you're probably wondering how the story fares, especially how its adapted from the manga. Now, I've only read the manga fairly recently, so I don't exactly have all the details nailed down, so at this point, in time, I can't really comment on that because I don't want to get some details wrong. The only details I can recall that the anime cut out are some additional scenes with Brau-1589 and introducing a certain villain character later than the manga did. I also won't comment on how Urasawa deliberately drew parallels to the Iraq War (Since 2003 was when Pluto was being published and the year the Iraq War began) or how it tackles issues of racism and terrorism, because others have done that far better than I could ever hope to do. But as far as vastly expanding on the Astro Boy arc in question, Urasawa did a fantastic job. In the original story, the "Greatest Robot on Earth" is little more than just a two chapter arc where Pluto kills a bunch of robots and is later beaten by Astro/Atom, with messages of what constitutes true strength, humanity's ego, and needless hatred. The different adaptations of said arc tackle things differently each time, which this ANN article elaborates on in more detail. Pluto decides to turn that whole arc not just into a whole series, but make it into a mix of a grounded mystery and a sci-fi thriller. This is reflected in how Gesicht is the main character and not Atom. I will say that the politics can lean towards being rather heavy-handed at times, though in light of current events, that might be more necessary than we might think considering how we still haven't quite learned our lessons from the Iraq War. Being someone who isn't normally into hard sci-fi or detective thrillers, I found Pluto to be easy to get into as its own entity that definitely tries to elevate the themes of the original manga, though your mileage may vary depending on what you want out of the anime. I'll need to re-read the manga at some point so I can get some details straight.

I was originally going to rate Pluto's anime adaptation a 94 out of 100, but a user on a Discord server I'm in actually made some pretty fair points about how the anime is almost TOO reverent to the manga in adapting it to the screen. Several points he mentioned included: Putting emphasis on putting all the dialogue onto the screen nuance be damned (And by that I mean turning what were a character's thoughts in the manga into spoken dialogue in the anime a la Promised Neverland), having the characters spell out the obvious, and the producers merely translating the manga panels onto the screen as opposed to animating them in ways that help it flow organically, even if it means changing the presentation, sequencing, or material itself. A good example of an anime elevating its source material and experimenting with the presentation is Frieren: Beyond Journey's End: In the manga, the sequence where Stark kills the Solar Dragon is just six singular manga panels, but the anime producers thought they could do more with it and decided to make it into a full-on action scene that's packed to the gills with dynamic camera angles, experimental animation that favors fluidity, kineticism, and impact over staying on-model, and creative storyboarding that no static medium could imitate. I have heard that Urasawa was heavily involved with the anime adaptation and was so stringent about how he wanted it to look that he got on pretty much every animator's last nerve. For all we know, that may have played a part in how Pluto's overall presentation came out, and I can understand some peoples' grievances with the adaptation being a little too one-to-one with the manga. That being said, considering all the dreck we get every season, Pluto is still absolutely one of the best anime to come out in the 2020s, bar none, and I'd gladly watch it over every single bad ecchi or isekai anime any day.

It may have taken six whole years for it to finally be made, and it's not without its problems, but Pluto is not only an absolutely top-tier sci-fi anime that you should watch at least once, it manages to stay true to the spirit of Osamu Tezuka's property. Plus, both it and the manga are pretty short, so if you ever want some place to start reading Urasawa's oeuvre, make it Pluto. And while you're at it, watch the English dub if at all possible, because it's amazing, and was directed by the same person who worked on the English dub for Monster a decade before!