Pluto - Naoki Urasawa & Osamu Tezuka
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| Image generated by AI |
Pluto is a fascinating work, at the crossroads of adaptation, science fiction, and psychological thriller. By freely reinterpreting an arc from Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, Naoki Urasawa doesn’t just pay homage—he delivers a mature, weighty, deeply human story that questions our relationship to war, consciousness, and otherness.
It all begins with the destruction of an elite robot. Then another. And another. Someone—or something—is hunting down the seven most powerful robots in the world. Gesicht, an inspector at Europol, is assigned to the case. He is himself one of the seven targets, and he gradually discovers that this affair goes far beyond a simple criminal investigation. It becomes a chasm of memory, war, guilt, and grief.
Pluto doesn’t try to revive the colorful universe of Astro Boy. Urasawa opts for a sober, dark, profoundly adult reinvention. He turns the story into an existential investigation. Every character—human or robot—is haunted by memories, mistakes, and solitude. The work speaks of war and reconciliation, technology and emotion, but above all, of how consciousness is shaped: through loss, through others’ gaze, through pain.
Gesicht, the robot detective, is one of Urasawa’s most powerful characters. Beneath his rational surface lies deep turmoil. He dreams, he doubts, he cries. His memory is threatened, manipulated. And above all, he senses the strangeness of what he’s becoming: something nearly human. But is that truly an evolution—or a curse? In a world where robots and humans coexist without ever truly understanding each other, the boundary between machine and man becomes unstable, disconcerting.
This manga forcefully questions our present. It speaks of distant wars we try to erase, traumas disguised as progress, and artificial intelligences we humanize without truly questioning ourselves. While reading Pluto, I felt that modern tension between memory and erasure, between justice and vengeance, between humanity and programming.
Urasawa’s graphic style, both precise and delicate, gives each gaze a disturbing intensity. This is not an action manga—it’s a story of atmosphere, silences, stares, and shadows. A slow, weighty noir that draws us into the darkest corners of what we call “consciousness.” And in this landscape, Astro (renamed Atom) is no longer a childlike robot—he’s a metaphor for innocence sacrificed.
Pluto struck me like few science fiction works have. Because it’s not just about an imagined future—it’s about our present and our failure to face the past. Urasawa offers no answers. He leaves us with a profound unease, and one haunting question: how far must we go to remain human?