Pluto

Gesicht, an android police detective of Europol, is tasked with finding the murderer of Montblanc, a retired war hero robot. Although it appears that only a robot could have committed this crime, the murder of a renowned robot rights activist casts doubts on the criminal's identity. Indeed, outside of an isolated and unexplained incident that occurred eight years ago, robots are programmed to be unable to kill human beings. However, the lack of human evidence on the crime scene and the similarity of modus operandi lead Gesicht to suspect that the two murderers might be the same being—be they man or robot.

Shortly after Montblanc's passing, another retired elite war robot is mysteriously eliminated. Gesicht notices a pattern in the choice of murder victim: both dead robots belonged to a group of the seven most powerful war machines ever designed. Determined to stop the murderer from eliminating the five remaining veterans, Gesicht seeks help from Atom, a cutting-edge android who resembles a human boy. The duo must now hunt down the rogue killer before the series of murders is carried on, lest the very fabric of society suffer irremediable damage.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Gesicht Main

Fuji, Shinshuu Japanese

Atom Main

Hikasa, Youko Japanese

Epsilon Supporting

Miyano, Mamoru Japanese

North #2 Supporting

Yamadera, Kouichi Japanese

Brau-1589 Supporting

Tanaka, Hideyuki Japanese

Tenma, Umatarou Supporting

Tsuda, Eizou Japanese

Pluto Supporting

Seki, Toshihiko Japanese

Dr. Ochanomizu Supporting

Furukawa, Toshio Japanese

Ali, Muhammad Supporting

Minami, Wakana Japanese

Uran Supporting

Suzuki, Minori Japanese

Nagasaki, Takashi Producer

Noda, Fuko Producer

Ge, Yangqian Producer

Udagawa, Sumio Producer

Reviews

Mar 20, 2025

RomanRonin

Recommended

Watching Pluto, I got a sense of why people often compare it to Monster. It has many of the same mystery elements, and it similarly takes advantage of the medium to control our narrative perception of the plot.

In some areas, it's a better anime. Specifically, in terms of brevity: while Monster often dragged on at points, Pluto does a great job at making each scene feel meaningful, a difficult feat for such a philisophically-deep, dialogue-dependent show. It's also fanastically animated, a perk of it being a modern adaptation. The composition of the anime is great, with dramatic scenes often hitting home with maximum effect. ...

However, the format also hurt it in terms of depth. Like, why are these seven robots in particular the world's most advanced? Helena shows just as much depth with her AI, and yet she's effectively ordinary save for a passing comment by some humans. Who's the teddy bear? Further reading shows its Dr. Roosevelt, but in a show with a conclusive ending, I shouldn't have to Google a character to know who they are.

I also think that while this show has a decently suspenseful mystery element, it feels fairly easy to trace once a few of the pieces are introduced, save for the aspects that you simply couldn't deduce due to a lack of information. It's not a detriment for this to be the case, but if you're looking for a Monster-level mystery above all else, you may be just a bit disappointed.

I still recommend this show because these flaws are minor compared to the composition of the show as a whole, but just be warned if you're the sort who fixates on smaller details.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Jan 12, 2025

Manjirin

Mixed Feelings

Pluto is something of a disjointed narrative that seems to want to say a lot but trips over itself so clumsily that I can't really take it as seriously as it wants to take itself.

To be clear this is a mostly competent story but it's definitely strongest at the start and gets progressively worse as the series goes on, culminating in a fairly contrived ending. This is a similar pattern to that of the other Urasawa work I have read/watched, Monster, where the general concept of the story and sense of journey is strong but the landing can't be stuck and in the end ... it undermines the strength of the story overall. I am starting to recognize that his personal quirks as an author and his method of storytelling is at best not something I personally gel with and at worst comes across just not as proficient and skilled as his reputation would suggest.

The world Urasawa creates here is admittedly fairly unique and creative, mixing elements of real-world places with a healthy dose of fictionalized aspects and overlaying it onto a semi-near futuristic setting that feels distant in some ways but not too distant in others. You have flying cars and advanced humanoid robots but police detectives still wear cheap suits right out of the 90s, that kind of thing. It's charming in many ways and you are left wanting to know more about the world and it's history but we don't get all that much.

Ultimately Urasawa doesn't appear interested in showing us how this imagined human-robot society and economy even works. What percentage of the population are robots? How and why have they not fully displaced humans from the workforce? While it's fine for Urasawa not to want to get bogged down in the details, when your story centers around human-robot relations and interactions these kinds of details strike me as important to consider if you want to craft a fleshed out and believable world which is able to carry the weight of your messages and themes.

The problem here isn't necessarily the setting, it's the fact that Urasawa seems to want to cash-in on the spectacle and novelty of futurism without thinking critically about how such a future could even exist. While this would be fine if this was a comedy or action-oriented series, it's clear that Pluto is intended to be a more cerebral and thoughtful piece of fiction. It comes across as Urasawa wanting to use robots and artificial lifeforms in a way to say something unique about the concepts of life and death but then not bothering to grapple with the details and mechanics around how or why loss in the context of an artificial and presumably fairly robust robot life would mean as much as loss of fragile and fleeting human organic life.

As far as themes explored I find them to be rather ham-fisted and incredibly unimaginative for a work in a sci-fi futuristic fantasy. For instance why on Earth could a robot, once physically "killed", not have their intact memory chip placed into a new body and essentially reborn or revived? This is perhaps the entire point in having removable personality or memory chips in such a world. Your body gets destroyed? No problem, here is a new one. In fact actual human characters in this same world are described as having been turned into robots/cyborgs after their human bodies are destroyed but the actual robots whose bodies perish can't be reconstituted? This is never explained or explored and it's just so dumb given how the story tries to say so much about the tragedy of loss and considering the melodrama that is employed it's just hard to take anything else in this world all that seriously.

Other aspects of the world are also begging to be scrutinized. Urasawa wants us to believe that there have been 38 previous central Asian wars prior to the continually referenced 39th? Where is the real-world analog to this to help make it even remotely believable? Come on. It would have sounded much more plausible if this event was the "5th central Asian war" for instance but Urasawa apparently wanted to impress the audience with such a high number. I'm not impressed, I'm just taken out of the world. This may seem like a small detail but these little contrivances are common and they add up and erode at your immersion and the believability of this setting and the perceived quality of the worldbuilding. When a story takes itself this seriously then so do I and that means some of the silly choices get less of a pass.

The best parts of the story are the small snippets where interesting characters appear and vignettes that tell a condensed story within the larger narrative of Pluto. Sometimes it is the back and forth banter centered on a legendary robot murderer held in something approximating a maximum security prison who came across as a bit too cartoonishly evil but captivating and original at the same time. Other times it was the C plot like the journey of radicalization taken by a man whose murdered brother was part of a anti-robot hate group and the journey coming full circle to the man's subsequent deradicalization and grappling with forgiveness. These episodes within episodes were much more compelling than the actual A or B plots at times.

Where Urasawa is strongest is when he starts to weave vague notions of international conspiracies, shadowy interest groups, slowly building up with the pace of a semi-psychological thriller... but this mostly falls apart as more is uncovered and revealed the less interesting it all turns out to be in the end. Many of the moments intended to be gasp-inducing pin-drops elicited only an eye-roll from me due to how predictable, telegraphed and self-indulgent they were in execution.

I am left unconvinced that this story offers any kind of profound commentary on war, existence, purpose or really any other theme. The anti-war message for example that is touched on repeatedly came across as fairly simplistic and juvenile in it's black-and-white presentation of one side as totally guilty and the other fully framed and misunderstood. Beyond that the message could be summarized as "war is bad". It's all just way too neat, tidy and preachy to carry any real weight and this is how I received the story's other attempts at philosophy.

Having both read the manga and watched the anime I can confirm that very much like Monster before it this is a very faithful manga-to-anime adaptation. It's basically 1:1. But like Monster that means that all the flaws of the manga's narrative translate directly to the anime as well. The soundtrack wasn't memorable but I don't recall it being bad. Watching the dub the voice acting was also serviceable but nothing particularly outstanding. The animation was however quite crisp, high-quality and in some places downright impressive. If I had to recommend one over the other I would probably go with the anime for the animation and presentation alone.

As a work of sci-fi entertainment and as a decent thriller story it isn't bad at all but it is difficult for me to see it as something more profound.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Dec 15, 2024

zaharded

Not Recommended

Funny

I completely do not understand why Pluto has such a high rating.
I get that it's a niche watch, but acclaimed critics scored this a "masterpiece", along with other titles like "the best netlifx original". Firstly I'd like to say that the animation is overrated - I could see the individual frames in most scenarios and even the "fights", which lasted 3 seconds lacked substance.
It essentially follows a detective who is trying to uncover some plot or whatever, but it just lacks any depth on the combat side of things, and I just generally think there were some plot holes.

Completely unrealistic and overly ambitious with ... a decent story that is stretched too far.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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	Poll: Pluto Episode 8 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) MegamiRem - Oct 26, 2023	146 replies	by Samu-tan »» Mar 22, 5:59 PM
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