A short review of the anime Pluto

It is often believed that the perspective of an outsider can grant new insights into what is going on inside. For me, Pluto has achieved this; The outsider, robots. The insider, us humans. Pluto is a great exploration into humanity’s base emotions and its consequences, much like the author Naoki Urasawa’s other famous works. However, the main object of study here is very fitting for a story about robots, machines that humans believe they can use as tools to achieve their own ends.

Pluto is a short story inspired from the 1950’s manga masterwork Astro Boy, specifically, a chapter from the manga called “The Greatest Robot On Earth”. In the original chapter, a sultan wanted to become the world’s apex power through control over the most powerful robot, so he commissioned a genius scientist to build Pluto, a robot with 1 million horsepowers. The robot was tasked to defeat the 7 most advanced robots on earth, including astro boy himself.

In Pluto, Naoki Urasawa has creatively reframed the story into something truly special: a short story about a Europol robot investigating a string of murders that leads to something more sinister. As a short story, the pacing is simply amazing; there is no dead air, everything an important character says lead to new insights about the case and the overarching schemes. Tension is kept and slowly gets built up until the penultimate episode. The music, dialogue, and animation all work together to lift up the narrative of robots trying to understand human emotions and what to make of them. The emotion that Pluto explores in depth is hatred. Through various robots, the story explores the many angles of hatred and the result of acting upon it. This all makes the characters feel very real. Moreover, the superb voice acting humanizes the character further, allowing us to relate to them and stimulating introspection.

Pluto poses a great question for us all. What does it mean to be a perfect artificial creation? If a robot can worry, love, aspire, or even hate, enough such that it can violate the laws that govern its computation, is it still a robot? Why do we hate, and what good is succumbing to hate? As we continue to train AI models based on the data that we generated, the data that contains our emotions, these questions will become very important. No matter if you are a technologist or someone who is trying to understand their own emotions, Pluto will give you some profound insights to think about.