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 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 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
