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Pluto was kind of disappointing, to be honest. The trailers looked amazing, and it appeared on a bunch of best of the year lists, so I was expecting something great. It was decent, but no where close to great.

Probably my biggest issue was that the entire series had an overly serious and dour tone, so much so that halfway in, I was almost dreading watching. Having a lighthearted moment or two amongst all the heavy stuff is needed-even Grave of the Fireflies has it. That was completely absent here, and the joyless feel made the series a bit of a slog.

Another issue was seeming confusion ... and inconsistency about robots, their nature, function, place in society, etc. Robots are a common subject for anime and scf-fi, and with so much of it out there, it's hard to forgive shows that don't work well with it. In Pluto, there was no reason or explanation for why robots even exist, and lots of incongruous issues with that. Why even have robots? Why do they look like people? Why is their consciousness in a chip? Why aren't copies kept wirelessly in cloud storage? We saw that robots can communicate with each other through an internet-like system, so why when a robot is physically damaged (not even completely destroyed-just a hole in their torso), are they dead? Why robot children? Do they grow, does their intelligence change or mature? I could go on, but there was just a lot around this issue that made no sense and was not explored at all.

Then there was the ending. Deus ex machinas aside (and there were those), there was a shift in tone to a lot of overly long, repetitive, preachy discourse on how all anger is bad and will destroy the earth, etc. It felt like it was written by some drug-addled hippie around 1970!

The animation was decent, if not great. At times it was quite good. Other times, not as much. Most bothersome for me was the clunky way people walked, and there was a lot of walking in the series. It never looked natural.

I didn't hate Pluto, but I can't say I really liked it either. The first two episodes were pretty good, but it went downhill from there.
6/10, my usual grade for things that are ok.