Manga is a bit like Steam. There are piles of it to choose from and most of it is meh. There are however the odd flowers in the pile that stand out. Pluto is certainly a flower. There’s a story behind the manga, which I won’t get into aside to say that it’s a re-telling of one of Astro Boy’s series. Well I guess I could add that retelling this is sort of like Frank Herbert allowing someone else to re-imagine Dune with all the same characters. Very hard to wrap your mind around how 1) the rights were allowed and 2) the sheer guts to even attempt this. But it worked!

Netflix somehow (of course they did) got the rights to an anime adaptation of Pluto. It is a ridiculously faithful adaptation, which helps as the manga itself had some amazing framing. It’s also one of the very rare anima where the English voice dubs are very well done! The fidelity here is impressive. And with 8 episodes at nearly an hour each, there’s a ton of breathing room for the slew of characters, yet short enough to not feel like there’s DBZ-level padding.

It is hard to categorize Pluto as it’s part murder mystery, sci-fi, thriller, action, and ethical treatise. The main line is the mysterious murders of the 7 most advanced robot AI as well as a group of humans that investigated advanced AI, which precipitated a giant war. We then get into a cycle of hatred, what happens after robots have the same rights as humans, what happens if you can’t forget, what actually makes a human, emotional cycles, and is it possible to have true redemption. Wall-E asked “what if robots had feelings”, and Pluto is a thesis on that exact question and more.

I realize I am in the right state of mind for this type of existential discussion. Love and hate, and anger and tolerance are all flowing through me like a raging river, beating at my walls of logic. I’m about to close a chapter in my life that has been holding a bookmark for over 10 years. A relationship that at a time I thought would frame my life, but instead I’ve used that to take a different path. I had moved on and not looked back for a while, and it’s time to reflect on the journey’s start.

The best art, regardless of medium, is the one that acts as a mirror. It takes a view on the human condition, pulls it apart, and then puts it back together so that it just hits different. Pluto is an impressive take on the human process of anger, guilt, redemption, peace, and legacy. It hit me square in the jaw.