Review: "Pluto" is a devastating anime about the soul of a machine

Taking a beloved, kid-friendly arc from Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy and re-writing it as a gritty, geopolitical murder mystery sounds like a recipe for pretentious disaster. Yet, Naoki Urasawa’s manga Pluto is widely considered a masterpiece. Now, after years in production, Studio M2 has delivered a Netflix anime adaptation that treats the source material with intense reverence. Set in a world where humans and advanced robots co-exist, the story follows Gesicht, a robot detective investigating the serial murders of the world’s seven most advanced robots and their human creators.

Pluto is deeply invested in the psychological toll of war. Almost all of the major robot characters are veterans of the 39th Asian Conflict—a blatant and brilliant allegory for the Iraq War—and they are all grappling with the morality of being built as weapons of mass destruction. The first episode, focusing on the gentle robot North No. 2 trying to learn how to play the piano for a cynical, blind composer, is an hour of television so profoundly moving it can stand entirely on its own as a short film.

The pacing is very deliberate. This is a dialogue-heavy detective noir, not an action shonen. The fights, when they do happen, are brief, brutal, and usually end in tragedy. If the series falters, it is in its final act, where the geopolitical conspiracy becomes slightly convoluted and relies on a few heavy-handed tropes. But as an exploration of whether artificial intelligence can learn to hate—and more importantly, learn to forgive—Pluto is an absolute triumph of mature anime storytelling.