It is a great time to be an animation fan! There are multiple challenging mature series that have premiered online in the past month alone!

So many new series, in fact, that keeping up with all of them would damn-near be a full time job. There are at least four other animated series I have yet to touch on other than maybe a cursory overview.

Note to streaming services – spread out your series premieres. I’m looking at you Netflix! Spreading out the premieres over the year will allow critics proper time to screen and publish reviews and give the audiences (who are busy with life and jobs) time to find and watch them.

As for the series Pluto, I am watching one episode a day. I am savoring the series, giving myself time to think about it and process the storytelling. Having watched more than half of the series certain aspects of the show has become clear and that is where this write-up begins.

NOTE: To get a quick overviews and synopsis of Pluto go here.

PLUTO

The Pluto Anime is a thoughtful, wildly entertaining, and properly mature translation of the classic manga.

Naoki Urasawa, the creator  of the Pluto manga, isn’t just a great comics creator. He is a creator that knows the history of his chosen art.

The same can be said of the anime director for Pluto, Toshio Kawaguchi. He has a long career working in the Japanese animation industry going all the way back to the Akira feature film but in searching his IMDB page, it appears Pluto is his directorial debut. A shock that the powers that be would choose an untested talent to take on such an important highly acclaimed project. The pressure to succeed must have been intense. And succeed he did! How he achieved it was to not get in the way of the manga and just bring the pages and panels forward into the anime to carry the flow of the story and tell the tale.

Another aspect to the show is to take various animation styles representing different ages of anime and use them within the series. In the opening of Episode one  the characters barely move. Our main protagonist Detective Gesicht walks slowly – one step at a time. The foley work highlights each footstep clopping across the hard kitchen flooring. It feels like a throwback to very old 20th century styled anime. The pace is almost enough to scare a viewer away.

But fear not, it soon becomes apparent the opening is intentional. The story picks up and carries the viewer deftly into the heart of this new world and new telling of Astro Boy, in a massive science fiction story at the level of William Gibson or Neil Stephenson.

Be aware, Pluto is not an action series, it is a science fiction mystery. And a great one at that. Koshio Kawaguchi tells us with one artistic touch after another that he knows his subject matter inside and out.

When Atom first confronts the robot killer that drives the mystery, his movement becomes looser, a little jagged. One of the most notable reference points to this sudden shift in Atom’s animation style is that of Tarantino’s Kill Bill. The animation in Kill Bill, specifically in the fight scene showing O-Ren Ishii’s family being murdered, is wild and fluid – likely it is fully 24 fps with the art style being loose and sketchy – very edgy for animation, almost unheard of in anime.

From one episode to another, one scene after another – the styling, pace, camera work, and animation of the characters – all shift up and down the phases of anime animation when the story demands it. It is an impressive achievement that makes the Pluto anime as much a classic as the manga before it.

The entirety of the series feels extremely well thought out with every aspect of the series working in unison as a complex whole, all designed to tease out the macguffin at the heart of the story.

Pluto is wildly entertaining, whip smart in its execution, and shockingly creative in how it tells its story. Pluto is a sci-fi mystery that demands to be revisited many times over.