Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Pluto
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Fluwm
 Posts: 1022 |
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The absolute best part of the Pluto anime is that it's been so long since I've read the manga that I've forgotten all of the details, and mostly just remember how much I loved it (and how it veered off into some unexpected direction at/around the midpoint). This is gonna be a fun ride,I think, for all of us.
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4603 Location: New York |
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From the second this was announced, everyone was expecting art. It seems those expectations were met.
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Minos_Kurumada
Posts: 1186 |
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Pluto its my favorite Manga.
I am glad it got such a good adaptation. |
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kuma991
Posts: 105 |
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I dozed off for a second there on the first episode, but was relieved to find out I had no reason to be skeptical of this adaptation. Urasawa is a storyteller of an entirely different range and you'd have to work really hard to obscure his genius. Additional kudos to the translators - they've done a magnificent job and really uplifted the material.
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levonr
 Posts: 820 |
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Nice that Kirk Thornton returned for the Black Jack cameo. Never thought I'd hear him in that role again.
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Shay Guy
 Posts: 2316 |
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Does anyone else remember the days before sites like AniChart and LiveChart.me, when each anime season would have people making charts themselves to compile all the new shows, in a single big image file? And there were always one or two people disseminating fake charts to troll people, with shows fans wanted to exist, but didn't, like a Baccano! sequel or whatever?
I've been thinking about those more often as the release of this anime has gotten closer, because Pluto, like Yotsuba&!, was a perennial appearance on those charts. I don't know if there's a good collection of them anywhere, but Google's shown me ones as far back as Winter 2012 that had Pluto. It's kinda neat how many of those joke anime eventually became real -- Vinland Saga, Gundam: The Origin, Sengoku Youko, Saint Young Men, March Comes In Like a Lion, a Sailor Moon remake, Eromanga Sensei, Shield Hero, Re:Monster. We even got a new Full Metal Panic season eventually! Granted, some of them were clearly just a matter of time ("this popular Jump series will get a second season!"), but others wouldn't become real for five years or more. The Narou anime boom hadn't even really begun when that chart with Re:Monster was made -- the KonoSuba and Re:Zero anime came out the next year.
I remember this bit was in the manga, but it's interesting timing for them to be adapting it.
This sentence no verb. |
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Minos_Kurumada
Posts: 1186 |
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Episode 1 seen, made me cry.
10/10 |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11596 |
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I don't see this as a direct commentary on the Iraq war in particular, so discrepancies between Pluto's plot and that war are irrelevant. I mean, Persia is now Iran, not Iraq, and the United States of Thracia would suggest a de-Balkanization of Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and, well, maybe the Balkans thrown in too. That the US didn't find wmd's in Iraq doesn't mean Persia (Iran) can't have robots of mass destruction in Pluto. And if the latter is the case, it still doesn't suggest there actually were wmd's in Iraq that were overlooked.
I think Urasawa was just using elements of real conflicts to remind people that his story isn't so far-fetched, since things like this do happen (were happening right then even). Sans robot AIs of course. Vietnam was too long ago, Afghanistan wasn't in the part of the world he was interested in focusing on, and Ukraine hadn't happened yet, so Iraq was just the natural contemporary reference for a major, pointless war. Anyway, this has been so good so far. Gesicht's seiyuu is doing a great job - I'm surprised at how little voice work he's done. Hope this brings him more work. |
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Fluwm
Posts: 1022 |
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It's both commentary and applicability -- there's no shortage of historical examples of wars being fought for specious justifications, and soldiers being manipulated into fighting them. Even -- or especially -- the mythic "good wars" operated this way, with most of the moral justification that lends them their mythic status having come about after the violence started. Any story that really cares to explore the whats and whys of war is very quickly going to become applicable to very many historical wars, even those written after the story itself. But with that said, the PLUTO manga began in 2003, so while its applicability gives it a universal quality, I think it's pretty clear that Urasawa would've been influenced by American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The invasion of Afghanistan was in 2001, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and even -- or especially -- at the time, it was clear to pretty much everyone that the stated justifications for the war (retribution for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Saddam Hussein's alleged stockpile of WMDs) were false, and that the Bush administration was simply manipulating public opinion to pursue their own interests. And the first chapters of Pluto were published just a few short months after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The parallels are not subtle, nor were they meant to be. Focusing on the geography is... missing the point. Persia has a very long and storied history of being used as a generic shorthand for the entire region of the Middle East, and the crucial part of "United States of Thracia" isn't the fourth word, but the first three. (Though it's worth pointing out that "Thracia" is a very similar word to "America" -- beginning on a stressed syllable, ending with an -a vowel.) Basically... it's not a coincidence. Urasawa didn't just randomly pick war imagery from whatever he was seeing on the TV news to toss into Pluto... he crafted Pluto very deliberately with parallels to U.S.' current wars, and did so in about as explicitly as he could have without literally setting the conflict during an American invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan. I think we can safely assume that he both wanted and expected his readers to make this connection. The broad applicability of war stories doesn't mean that specific wars, themselves, possess the same quality -- they're not interchangeable. In a universe where Urasawa was writing Pluto influenced instead by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or the Vietnam War, or the present violence in Israel would look very different to the version of Pluto that we have -- even if they'd still share many themes.
...I'm still pretty annoyed/frustrated by the Gundam: The Origin adaptation (overall it amounted to very much a corrupt-a-wish sort of thing) but, yeah, I've definitely taken notice how pretty much all of my dream anime, that I thought would never happen... actually wound up happening in the last decade or so. Hell, several of those came out just this year! And even if some of those projects don't turn out very well (pour one out for Invisible Victory) it's still a pretty amazing thing to see. As much as it may sometimes seem as though we're being inundated by nothing but low-effort, low-quality Isekai/Narou chaff... that is very much not the case. Last edited by Fluwm on Thu Nov 02, 2023 7:11 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11596 |
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And you've missed my point, but that's my fault. I didn't feel like writing a full-length essay and went for brevity and so failed to get anything across. I still don't feel like writing that essay, except to say I never suggested anything he wrote was coincidental. So I'll just drop it and go enjoy the series, and think what I think about it. 
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Shay Guy
Posts: 2316 |
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2001 was Afghanistan, 2003 was Iraq. (Checking Wikipedia, Pluto's debut was about four months after the Mission Accomplished speech, and four weeks before the Iraq Survey Group finally admitted they hadn't found WMDs. It was a monthly manga, so that would've been right around chapter 2.)
It sounded to me like you were saying something like… if Pluto had come before the Iraq war, or significantly later, Urasawa would've drawn from another conflict for his allusions, and the specific follies of that war aren't so important for what he was trying to do. Am I off-base? |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11596 |
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Yeah, pretty much that. My main reason for posting was to say that despite the correlations, Urasawa is in no way bound to the actual history, so any deviations the story takes can't be pointed to as him rewriting history or as commentary on that particular war, and that's why I don't see it as being problematic. So the question then would be, if it's not the Iraq war in particular he's criticizing, then why make overt allusions to that war at all, instead of placing the story's war in Desertodenialandia? I mean, Iraq wasn't the only war happening around then, and he had to have planned a good deal of his story before the actual start of the war (though he could tweak some things on the fly, like the statue of Hussein). I think Iraq was simply a convenient allusion to make (you could see it coming even in 2001), since the original story placed the deposed dictator Sultan Ababa in that part of the world. But I think it was also to keep people from missing the futility of war and hate for the sci-fi detective story with giant robots. If there are real life examples of the story going on right before readers' eyes, it's harder to dismiss and easier to take to heart. |
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Ajc228
Posts: 265 |
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It’s a shame that Urasawa is so particular about his adaptations. Except for a few exceptional cuts of animation by Shinya Ohira, this is a pretty bland adaptation. Slavish adherence to the source material is placed above utilizing the medium to its’ full potential.
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Gonbawa
Posts: 57 |
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This.
Pluto was the series I was most looking forward to this year. What a disappointment: the direction is insipid, the pace is too slow, and most of the cuts are dialogue scenes filmed very flatly. A 1:1 adaptation of the manga, itself mostly made up of numerous boxes with talking heads (or busts), is not the best approach. |
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Theozilla
 Posts: 144 Location: Oakland, California |
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I stayed up late last night finishing the Pluto anime (I watched the English dub; I am planning on rewatching it in Japanese and the German dub eventually) and now I am putting down my thoughts after having slept on them.
Urasawa’s Pluto is one of my favorite manga (and comics) of all time, so I was very invested at the prospect of it getting an anime adaption (regardless of the fact that I expected I would end up, and still do, preferring the manga as the best way to experience the story). Anyways, overall, the Pluto anime is a great anime and a good adaption. The animation was very good, though I agree with the common criticisms that parts of it could have had better compositing. I do have a few criticisms of it as an adaptation though, critiques that go beyond the standard practice of shortening, slightly modifying, and cutting of (less plot-essential) dialogue and scenes that come when an anime adapts a manga (especially text and plot dense ones). I essentially have three major/not-insignificant criticisms of how the story got adapted (though I am quite aware that the cause of these shortcomings may be more due to the anime production just not having the time and/or resources to do so, than being deliberate creative choices). My first criticism is the fact spoiler[that in the manga Gesicht and Brau-1589 did end up exchanging memory chips (this happens at the end of volume 2 in the manga, which is roughly analogous to what episodes 2 and/or 3 of the anime adapted). Cutting that plot point from the anime is a significant story loss IMO as it was an essential step in Gesicht’s character arc, specifically him slowly realizing that parts of his memory were erased. It also diminishes the effectiveness of Brau-1589’s character as not only does it further explain and justify why Brau considered himself and Gesicht to be two of a kind (i.e., Brau was able to notice and discern Gesicht’s erased memories) it also removes narrative parallel/“rhyming” of how Atom had previously read Gesicht’s memory chip and is implied to have picked-up on the same erased memories as well. Also not getting to hear Brau-1589 do the haunting line of "500 Zeus a body" voiced-acted is a crying shame. Secondly, the choice to cut out the various scenes Dr. Roosevelt, the immobile super-computer A.I., and the President of the not!USA, from the first half of the story was a mistake. In the manga, by volume 2, the audience is supposed to be explicitly clued-in to the fact that Dr. Roosevelt and the President are directly involved the serial murder conspiracy (with the how and why still being unknown). Not having this context established before the second half of the story in the anime I would imagine makes the later scenes of Dr. Roosevelt and the President that do get adapted much more confusing and random for an anime-only watcher. It also diminishes the greater connective and overarching themes of the narrative, particularly the ones critical of the USA and Neo-imperialism (which I cynically wonder if that was one of the reasons said scenes were cut). Excising the earlier Dr. Roosevelt scenes and references to it, as well as the parallels with Brau-1589 (and the theme of robots feeling hatred and other extreme emotions), brings down the quality of the character and thematic writing in general as well. And finally, a few adaptation choices done in the final eighth episode, I feel brought down the quality of the climax. Beginning with the least significant one, but still important IMO, was the cutting of Doctor Tenma and Professor Hoffman’s scene at Gesicht’s grave. Besides it further elucidating the themes of the narrative, it’s also just a loss in terms of giving a bookend to Hoffman’s role in the narrative and his relationship with Gesicht. Next, is the anime’s decision to make Bora completely non-verbal when Atom and Pluto confront him during the climax. In the manga, the intelligence of Goji/“Abullah” was still present, which not only made the climax more emotionally engaging, but it also specifically made Pluto/Sahad coming to terms with the ghost of his father much more effective as well. Lastly, and my biggest issue with how episode 8 adapted volume 8, was the choice to have Atom remembering Gesicht’s final words and the flashback that reveals how Gesicht found the robot child he and his wife adopted, occur in the middle of the scene where Professor Ochanomizu witnesses Atom picking up a snail and showing how he still has his humanity intact after being revived in the way that he was. In the manga said scenes occurred right before Atom is about to deliver a killing blow to Pluto (and are subsequently intercut with the remainder of the climax). The anime rearranges the contents of volume 8 in episode 8 really messes up the flow, particularly the emotional flow, of the story’s climax and makes less engaging and effective as a concluding experience.] Anyways, despite those three major areas I took issue with, I still really enjoyed the Pluto anime and consider it to be a great work overall. Though I still recommend the manga as the best and proper way to experience the story. |
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