Netflix’s Gritty Astro Boy Adaptation Looks Incredible
Pluto anime Atom flying
Later this month, Netflix will premiere a gritty new anime series. In it, super-intelligent robots live side-by-side with humans, and a highly advanced robot decides that the only way to stop human hate is to destroy humans. Also, it’s based on Astro Boy.
The new anime series is called Pluto, and is actually an adaptation of a manga series by Naoki Urusawa. That makes the Pluto series an anime based on a manga based on a manga, which is a little bit intense but is surprisingly more common than you’d think. The manga ran from 2003 to 2009, and was overseen by Macoto Tezka, the son of Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka.
Pluto is based on the Astro Boy story arc The Greatest Robot on Earth, widely considered to be one of the best stories in Astro Boy’s entire storyline. Urusawa rewrote the story from the perspective of Gesicht, a crime-solving detective tasked with solving a murder mystery that has seen numerous humans and robots killed and mutilated.
The manga itself is pretty intense, asking very thought-provoking questions about war, humanity, and artificial intelligence that don’t always have clean answers. The upcoming anime looks to be following in those footsteps pretty closely, with a trailer that is already hitting some heavy emotional notes.
The new Pluto anime is being produced by Genco and Tezuka Productions, with animation by Studio M2, best known for its work on the excellent Onihei in 2017. Perhaps most exciting (for me anyway) is that the score for the series is being composed by Yugo Kanno, whose incredible compositions have appeared in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Psycho-Pass, and Gundam Reconguista in G, among many others.
Here’s the synopsis for Pluto, direct from Netflix itself:
In a world where humans and robots coexist, Europol detective Gesicht is on the case when a string of powerful robots are destroyed, leading him to believe that the culprit is targeting the most advanced robots in the world – including himself. But things take a shocking turn when key humans involved in robot law start getting killed off one by one, and there's no clear sign of a perpetrator at the murder scenes. As Gesicht investigates, he meets the highly advanced robot Atom, whose emotions and AI leave him questioning his own identity. Together, they uncover a dark plot that could spell the end of the world as they know it. But with the clock ticking, can they stop the greatest evil in history before it's too late?
Pluto will be released exclusively on Netflix on October 26, 2023.
