Pluto Review

Structuring this as a detective story is what makes it land. Gesicht works the case as procedure, interviewing survivors and cataloguing evidence, so the horror accumulates through testimony rather than incident. Each of the seven great robots gets an episode-sized portrait before the plot needs them dead, which means North No. 2 learning piano and Brando's family are not sentimental detours but the argument itself. Urasawa's transposition of the Astro Boy story into a post-invasion inquiry, complete with fabricated justifications for a war fought over weapons that did not exist, is pointed without ever stopping to explain itself.

Studio M2 animates in a restrained, weighty register, with deliberate pacing, subdued colour, and character acting precise enough that a robot's stillness reads as grief. The hybrid CG for the larger machines is the one visible seam. Where it falls short of the top tier is the final act, which resolves a carefully human-scaled tragedy with a volcano and a superweapon, a compression the eight-episode format forces on it.