The story, fluent and interesting, revolves around four main characters, it manages to explore deeply their personality, behaviours and actions. They all work as part of a team of debris cleaners on a space ship called the Toy Box, to clean the orbit from space debris produced by humans in order to keep spaceship's paths clean and avoid catastrophic collisions.
My impression while reading Planetes was that the plot's main aim is to develop characters: they pursue their dreams or they try to repair past mistakes, helped by the development of the manga. Planetes takes inspiration from characters' issues to talk about major themes like the mysterious relationship between man and space, the Kessler syndrome or astronauts' issues with their families when they stay in space for long periods of time due to their jobs.
Hachirota Hoshino, Ai Tanabe, Fee Carmichael and Yuri Mihalkov are the characters that are explored the most. Hachirota dreams to buy his own spaceship to become a free space explorer; Ai is an innocent girl that believes in love (her name, Ai, means love) and respect between people; Fee understands step by step the value of kindness and love by the complicated relationship between her, her son and the whole earth; Yuri dedicates himself to clean space from debris after his wife has been killed by a space flight accident caused by the impact with a debris. There aren't random characters, they all have their past, their story to narrate, a goal. This is what intrigued me the most.
The art is very detailed and realistic, especially when it comes to spaceships and landscapes, but I didn't like that much the representation of the characters. Usually they are very simple and similar to each other and you tend to confuse them, especially when they are wearing space suits, and this complicates things quite a bit since there are many jumps between various characters during the story.
It's a very original show, at least for what I've seen/read until now, that mixes realism with funny parts, all together to create a really nice sci-fi manga. It takes time to read, since some parts are pretty heavy, and tends to give the reader many informations at the same time, but it's definitely worth it. The most of sci-fi fans will surely like Planetes if they don't consider sci-fi only a sequence of space fights and big advanced weapons.
Story: 8
Art: 8
Character: 9
Enjoyment: 8
