When Pluto dropped on Netflix last month, not very many spectators were quite sure what to do with it. The project is an echo of an echo of an echo, and several more. Naoki Urasawa’s manga is based on Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy story "The Greatest Robot on Earth," which was first published all the way back in 1964. The cultural milieu of this moment, nearly 60 years ago, is difficult for us to grasp in the present day. But Urasawa's co-writer, Takashi Nagasaki, makes a valiant effort in the postscript to the eighth and final volume of the manga book series, discussing his childhood friend Matsuda and the playground arguments they had about whether Astro Boy is cooler than Mitsuteru Yokoyama Tetsujin 28-gō, known in English as Gigantor.
The childish nature of the dispute belies the greater depth Nagasaki sees as years go by, as he comes to conclude that the arc of the story was not to show that Astro Boy was the strongest robot in the world, but that he was the first to understand the meaningless of war. So it is that despite the seeming simplicity—even childishness—that the name "Astro Boy" evokes, the legend of that name and Osamu Tezuka at large as the fountainhead of postwar manga is easy to understand. These were existentialist comics, not 'adult' so much as very good about condensing complex ideas into a form children could easily understand.
It was from this context that Naoki Urasawa started drawing Pluto in 2003. His art is indisputably more tense and far less cute than Tezuka’s, and his reputation may be of a more 'serious' type, coming from long suspense thrillers like Monster and 20th Century Boys. When translating Pluto into English, VIZ Media unsurprisingly decided to rename Astro Boy to "Atom" - far closer to the Japanese moniker for the character, Tetsuwan-Atomu, and a commentary in its own right on how the original 1960s English localization of the "Astro Boy" anime refused to treat it seriously, because cartoons were kids’ stuff. Yet Pluto retains much of the accessibility of the original story, and is commonly classified as appropriate for young adults.
By the time the Pluto manga ended in 2009, there was already plenty of interest in an animated adaptation. The postscript to the 7th collected volume featured Masao Maruyama, then-head of the animation studio Madhouse, practically salivating at the chance to adapt the story, having produced three anime of Urasawa’s comics in the past. It was only with Netflix that Maruyama, through his latter-day Studio M2 and director Toshio Kawaguchi, finally had the chance to make this passion project a reality - perhaps not coincidentally after the streaming giant gained the rights to Madhouse's anime of Monster, among other projects.
As an adaptation, the animated Pluto makes few changes to its source material. Indeed, one of the eeriest aspects of the Urasawa style is how there’s relatively little movement and action despite the sheer tension of the scenes. Paradoxically, in animated form, Pluto calls greater attention to this fact simply because when a person watches an anime, they generally expect to see animation, not drawn-out conversations. A major consequence of this is how the few scenes that do have significant movement, implied or otherwise, hit that much harder. The repair of a robot dog has its heartbreaking nature greatly magnified by the object’s pathetic twitching. One of the greatest visual contrasts of the anime is how such details underline the difference between low pathetic robots, like a wounded flower-seller with the voice of a child, and protagonist Gesicht, a serious yet soft-spoken Europol detective who’s one of the titular Pluto’s seven targets as one of the world’s most powerful robots.
But the context of 2023 is different from the 1964, or the 2003, or even the 2009 context of the prior iterations of this story. The whole idea of "robots"—artificial intelligence—has radically changed since then; AI has shifted the terrain away from something aspiring to be close to human, but rather employed as an imitation of human action. The Pluto animation itself, having hand-drawn effects written over with CG or altered with digital composting, is indicative of this trend.
In one way, it’s a testament to the strength of Urasawa’s original style that the story’s drawn-out impact can so easily be translated to screen. But ironically, this fidelity to the letter of Urasawa’s vision may have come at the expense of its more spiritual significance. Tezuka's "The Greatest Robot on Earth" is a tale of dark optimism in the chaos of the Cold War, its needlessly destructive battle among robots, waged for no other reason than proving who’s the strongest, proving an apt allegory for the world’s nuclear stalemate. The Pluto manga likewise beheld a new world order of rapid technological advancement - but this time, the fear was shifted from the weapons themselves to those who created the weapons, trying to rationalize their use of them.
Both stories are significant largely because of the context of those eras. The Pluto anime may be exceptionally well-made, yet it remains a story of yesteryear, and not a commentary of the world as we know it today. The robots of Pluto feel surreal in the present day because they have an acute understanding of what it means to suffer. This, as robots in the real world not only don’t understand what it means to suffer, while humans likewise pretend that despair is just another illusion. The slow pacing of the Pluto anime likewise seems to defy our increasingly short attention spans. In the long run, this may limit the significance and reach of the Pluto anime compared to its manga predecessors. All the same, I’m glad to have seen it.
