This Week in Anime

PLUTO is a Masterclass in Anime Reimaginings

Chris
Steve, we've got a two-for-one deal on storied anime adaptations this week. Not only has Netflix graced us with yet another take on Osamu Tezuka's esteemed oeuvre, but this is also a new anime adaptation of a manga by the notoriously nuanced Naoki Urasawa.

It may not be a cold day in hell, but it's at least a momentous one in the unique underworld of PLUTO.

Truly, nothing embodies the "anime for grown-ups" vibe of a Urasawa joint quite like an absence of the ol' dot-noses. Then again, that might not all be down to Urasawa's preferences. He's taking on Tezuka here, who had a predilection for prominent proboscises. Even Urasawa's take on Dr. Tenma has rounded things off considerably.

Sidebar: I am only just now realizing that when broadly discussing Urasawa's works, I might need to specify which Dr. Tenma I am talking about.

Speaking as a child of the post-9/11 era, the War on Terror, and the invasion of Iraq, I found myself periodically taken aback by PLUTO's directness. I hadn't read the manga myself, so I got freshly affected by this anime version by just how blunt its allegory was. I don't know that I'd fault anyone who turned it off because they were hoping for a bit more of an escape in their Astro Boy spin-off.

That would be the ideal place to bring up Disney's WW2-era propaganda cartoons where Donald Duck hashed it out with Hitler, but that leads to a key point about PLUTO: It's not exactly a new idea. Taking a beloved pillar of classic comic/cartoon history and transforming it into a vector for a serious approach has a fair amount of precedent in the art form. Granted, it can't always be as nuanced as PLUTO, so you just as often wind up with stuff like SYFY making The Banana Splits into a slasher flick or that hackneyed new attempt to turn the freshly public-domain Winnie the Pooh into a horror movie.

That concept seems to shake out better in our familiar anime and manga sphere here, even if they aren't as common. 2015 brought us Yatterman Night, an interesting experiment that rebooted the Time Bokan franchise's progenitor (alongside several other Tatsunoko series) from the perspective of the villains, AKA the main thing most people fondly recalled from Yatterman.

And hell, this very season has blessed us with Power of Hope: Precure Full Bloom, which sees the childhood heroes of previous Pretty Cures all grown up and grabbing beers after work together to cope with the anxieties of adulthood.

Gatchaman Crowds (which just turned ten this year, jeez, speaking of aging) swings close to what PLUTO is doing. No, it's not repeating or recreating many characters from the original the way Urasawa's Astro Boy take-off is. But Crowds uses the framework of the classic Gatchaman and what a "Science Ninja Team" can be to comment on (then) relevant modern social issues. Often in the same ripped-from-the-headlines way as PLUTO.


And often with the same degree of subtlety.

That's another aspect to elucidate on. It would feel a little disingenuous to act like Urasawa's PLUTO was only using Astro Boy as a convenient template. Osamu Tezuka's works, Astro Boy included, had their density, darkness, and capacity for commentary. Many unsuspecting kids were scarred by Unico. Plenty of the God of Manga's output includes ideas about robots as reflections of humanity and its capacities, like Metropolis.

Tatsunoko's an oddly consistent source of this sort of thing, aren't they? It's a testament to the lasting influence of archetypical entries like Gatchaman and Casshern that they're so ripe for reinterpretation. I don't know that PLUTO ever hits the same levels of esotericism that Sins winds up playing in, but it's impossible not to see the parallels, concept-wise.

It's an approach that can be applied to "classic" anime series, even if they weren't necessarily pitched to younger audiences. Go Nagai's Devilman delved so profoundly into darkness by its finish that it famously never had its original ending wholly adapted until 2018's Devilman Crybaby. But even within that context, Masaaki Yuasa's take on the material still comes off as a radical, personal reinvention by the artists behind it striving to say things about the society the story occupied in its moment.

That leads me to PLUTO's one entertaining quirk. It would be entirely possible for some unsuspecting viewer to click onto this cool-looking new Netflix show and make it up to at least the end of the first episode, not even realizing they were watching an Astro Boy riff. It's presented as a customarily tight Urasawa thriller and 100% works on its own terms.

That might be down to opting to use the original Japanese names for the characters, regardless of release territory. It is cool but also a little disappointing that we didn't get to hear meditations on war crimes and the capacity for human hatred coming out of people with names like "Dr. Packidermus J. Elefun."

I can't blame Urasawa for his delicate feelings on approaching the source material, given its storied status. That aspect, as well as the structure of the original manga's volumes, also speaks to the subject of adaptation as applied to PLUTO itself. At eight hour-long episodes, Netflix's PLUTO would seem to roughly correspond to the respective manga volumes, and that extra-length format feeds into the prestige thriller vibes the work is shooting for.

I have seen some commentators out there begrudged that PLUTO's visuals are played so grounded and straight. But I'm on your team that it fits the tone and intent of the story to a T. It's not necessarily surprising given how infamously particular Urasawa can be about the presentation of his work. This is a guy who didn't even let his manga be published digitally until recently. So, in that respect, it makes sense the anime version would hew so close to the manga panels. It straight-up reproduced a bunch of them for its opening sequence.

It's only a little ironic that a work that is itself a radical adaptation of Astro Boy gets an adaptation that's more transpositional than transformative.

Even with the wilder robot designs or several setpieces involving characters fighting a giant tornado, I honestly can't disagree with continuing to play this one in Urasawa's carefully calculated clinical style. It means that for a story that's pointedly 75% talking heads having discussions as this kind of plot is wont to be, it never falls into the bloated feeling of more disposable Netflix fare. By the end of its run, I honestly felt PLUTO had earned its eight-hour movie status.


Also, just because its style trends towards "grounded" doesn't mean that PLUTO can't throw out a striking scene or two when it wants to. Netflix's bitrate be damned.

Twenty years removed from its inception, this turns an adaptation of PLUTO from a current events commentary into something even more steeped in cultural history than those Tatsunoko shows. It can be easy for commentators in These Modern Times to muse on the Iraq War and question the level of opposition to it at the time. PLUTO's story, originally started in 2003, shows how people in all parts of the world were already considering the invasion. Adapting it in 2023 lets them hammer home how right they were in those fears.

It speaks to the value and opportunities of an offshoot like PLUTO. The original "The Greatest Robot on Earth" storyline from Tezuka's Astro Boy featured a deposed Middle Eastern dictator as the directing force of the PLUTO robot. Urasawa took the opportunity to flesh that aspect out as a vector for his commentary on the then-current situation. It's in the same vein as Gatchaman Crowds's treatises on technology and social media in how it uses elements of the original to illustrate how those can still be used to explore ideas in the modern day.

Put another way: Urasawa could have commented on the Iraq War in a wholly original story. But it adds another layer to its salience to illustrate how its relevance can be reflected in the themes of something as foundational as Astro Boy.

It's pretty cool how this anime can feel so quintessentially Urasawa, even as he's right in the middle of the adaptation sandwich that is its existence. But the strength of that voice is, as you mentioned, key to this sort of reinvention working at all. Separate from its prestige as a Urasawa manga adaptation or its "Astro Boy For Adults" high-concept pitch, PLUTO can stand as a story on its own. That's way beyond something where the joke doesn't land if you don't know who the hell The Banana Splits are.

Forget any deftly applied layers of adaptational allegory; That's how you know the man is a true genius.