Grab a first glimpse at Pluto, a new eight-episode anime series coming to Netflix on Oct. 27 — an international murder mystery in a world of noble robots and flawed humanity, based on the manga by Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki.
In American comics, the idea of one of the best modern creators revisiting the work of a mid-century comics great is baked into the form. But in Japan’s comics tradition, such things are quite a bit more singular. Pluto is inarguably perched atop those efforts, as a retelling of the Astro Boy story “The Greatest Robot on Earth,” by Osamu Tezuka, the “Father of Manga.”
In a nutshell, the story follows the internationally known robot detective Inspector Gesicht as he searches for the perpetrator of a series of killings seeming to target the most powerful robots in the world and the most famous advocates for robot rights. But in a broader way, Urasawa touches on humanity’s capacity for war and prejudice, and the tragedy of creating thinking robots to be our heroes and our weapons simultaneously — something pretty close to the heart of anyone who grew up on Tezuka’s widely read and superlatively influential Astro Boy.
Netflix’s adaptation is a real whopper, consisting of eight hour-long episodes, the same number as there are volumes in the manga itself. It will hit the streaming service on Thursday, Oct. 26.
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