In 1964, Tezuka Osamu, the father of manga and author of Astro Boy,
wrote a chapter called “The Greatest Robot on Earth”.
In this story, a sultan built a robot with the purpose of becoming the king of all robots,
and by proxy, ruler over the modern world. But in order to achieve that dream, this evil,
horned creation first had to triumph against the seven most powerful robots on earth,
including our hero, Astro Boy: what ensued rapidly escalated from a mere fight between robots
into a grand battle with the fate of the world at stake, as most stories of this type do.
But just as much as Tezuka Osamu’s work can be labeled as shounen-muke no manga, stories made
for young teens, it can also be argued that his repertoire holds all of the ingredients needed
for a much darker and thematically remarkable story as well. Japanese textbooks, even, note
the vast array of deeper subgenres his stories explore: religion, fine arts, the universe…
even going into Osamu’s unabashed discussions of the importance of life, futility of war,
and the future of humankind. In the appropriate context,
even a story so reminiscent of childhood nostalgia and the ambition of a young boy,
could certainly be twisted into a dark tale… And nearly 40 years later,
Naoki Urasawa’s melancholic, brooding reimagining of The Greatest Robot on Earth proved just
that in the murder-mystery named after the story’s monstrous killer robot seeking world domination:
Pluto.
What is uniquely interesting about Pluto is that,
though it might be chronicled in the annals of time being known as a masterfully warped
reimagining of one of Tezuka Osamu’s greatest stories,
I didn’t know this context at all before I read it. After I saw that Pluto was only eight volumes,
notably shorter and more tightly plotted than any of Naoki Urasawa’s other more famous works, like
Monster and 20th Century Boys, all I expected coming into this story was another incredible,
suspenseful, and contemplative crowning literary piece to add to Urasawa’s collection…
and before I knew the background of this story and after, that is still exactly what I got.
Though the original framework of this manga, should I say, was built by the late Tezuka Osamu,
Urasawa fleshed out The Greatest Robot on Earth in nearly every way to create Pluto,
to accommodate for his darker style and unique prowess as a mangaka. In his rendition,
this future take on our world has developed robots just as advanced, if not more
than humans; laws exist to protect robot rights, even, blurring the line between them being
obedient servants to humans and being their own equal, autonomous inhabitants of earth;
but this advanced world is also in recovery. a great war in Central Asia was incited in
response to a rebellious country’s secret development of immensely destructive robots,
and ironically, the rest of world sent their own robots-believed to be invincible, unflinching,
and emotionless, the perfect tools for war- to massacre the entirety of this country that got a
bit too ahead of themselves. The 7 most powerful robots in the world were tasked with the job-
Montblanc, the beloved lumberjack and heart of Mother Nature; North 2, a reclusive butler;
Heracles and Brando, the strongest wrestlers on the planet; Epsilon, a photon-powered pacifist;
Gesicht, a Europol detective known for his unrivaled deduction abilities;
and of course, Atom, or Astro Boy. After this war, people of earth sit in a capricious state of both
gratefulness and reverence towards robots like Atom for being the forefront of technology
and embodiment of human heroism, and also hatred towards them as they infringe
closer and closer onto the precipice of what makes us human unique.
In Urasawa’s Pluto, rather than pushing Atom as the narrative center of the story as you
would expect, Urasawa actually tells most of it through Gesicht, the detective; an appropriate
shift for this mystery- thriller take on Pluto’s battle to become The Greatest Robot on Earth.
Gesicht the detective investigates the string of unprecedented robot-related murders that Pluto
leaves in his destructive wake, where all of the victims are adorned with horns; a symbol of the
Roman God of the Underworld, Pluto, and a suitable serial-killer-esque motif added in by Urasawa.
While Gesicht battles his own internal monsters and comes to terms with what it means to be a
robot in society, Gesicht must also find and understand the horror that is Pluto,
one that he slowly realizes is targeting him and the other 6 greatest robots as well
in a scheme that is much greater than anyone could have anticipated.
Pluto is a complex story; I would argue that it’s Urasawa’s most complex that I’ve read,
which could be due to the fact that the majority of his work on this project went into thinking
about how he can expand on Osamu’s original plot, without having to write that foundation himself.
Pluto is very much its own iceberg; at the tip of the iceberg is the summation of the knowledge of
most people- the fact that Pluto is a remake of an old Astro Boy story arc, small details like that;
while a massive, submerged part holding societal subtexts and Urasawa’s own philosophical flair
lies below the surface of it all. In fact, I don’t think that I, alone, could fully
encapture all of this in one video; I’ve provided a few great articles to read about the series to
understand it further in the description, which I read through in the attempt to at least make
a dent on this titanic iceberg myself. But I will certainly attempt it, and one of the most
pronounced and ever present themes permeating this story, defining the shifting balance between human
and robot, and the most important when attempting to present all of the other ideas in Pluto is:
What is Perfection?
“Frustration, great hatred, hatred so strong it could cause one to kill
a man… these things nurture an AI… Only a wrong mind can be perfect.”
This line from Dr. Tenma, the creator of Atom in the story, takes a lot to unpack. At the
end of the day, we must remember what this story is about: The Greatest Robot on Earth.
Moving past Tezuka’s Osamu simple idea of the ‘greatest’ robot being the strongest
one of them all, Urasawa also integrates our modern debates on what makes technology
‘great’, what can be summed up as their ability to imitate or transcend human function.
Pluto discusses this idea to a much greater depth than most manga that touch on this;
for example, in this story, laws have been made to protect robots rights. Crime against robots is
just as illegal as it is against humans, and more so than anything, in Pluto, robots have emotion.
Typical robot stories delve into the gap between humans and robots as this ability to feel emotion,
but Pluto does the opposite and looks at what happens when that gap separating them disappears.
Atom, Gesicht, all of the 7 greatest robots were created to imitate human nature; humans hate,
they feel sadness, so a perfect robot should be able to do these things as well.
In a way, this story reverted robots to more of a different race than humans,
rather than a lower species; there are subtle hints showing this,
and more obvious ones like extremely on-the-nose comparisons of anti-robot organizations
to racial supremacy groups. But I digress… and I return to Urasawa’s discussion of
how a robot being an exact imitation of a human, what technically makes a robot perfect,
is a contradiction in and of itself. A robot kills a human at the beginning of Pluto’s story,
and people begin questioning its AI in response; what went wrong? How is it possible that it killed
a human when robots are specifically coded not too? Wasn’t it supposed to be perfect?
That is exactly the problem, actually, as Atom notes; “a perfection that kills people…
isn’t that a human?” That robot killing a person did not make him any less perfect,
but actually better than other robots because it is now even closer to being human. When a robot
begins to surpass its own code even, show emotion and its own volition, it becomes- in a sense-
‘perfect’. It is, quite ironically, a flawless imitation of the very imperfect human. The humans
in this story create robots in their own image, and strive to make them indistinguishable from us,
but then are surprised when they begin expressing human traits of their own.
This story is so dark because it makes it clear that humankind’s idea of right and wrong, perfect
and imperfect, is severely skewed. The main cast of 7 robots, actually, feel like the morally best
characters in the entire series… until we slowly see them show more and more humanity, hatred and
sorrow, and their pursuit of perfection- i suppose- reversely becomes a horrible sight
to behold. And nothing embodies that horror of humanity more in Pluto than it’s discussion of
The Futility of War.
Tezuka Osamu first began his career as a mangaka in 1947, in the years following the second Great
World War and a period of both immense strife and post-war recovery for Japan. It makes sense
why this same background being added to Pluto would be an appropriate homage to his work.
Robot stories typically glorify them as machines of war, tools for utter destruction;
but, once again, because Pluto uniquely gives its robots emotions- or at least a semblance of them,
and the ability to feel them- it sheds an entirely different light when they’re sent to war.
The mountain of corpses that these 7 sat upon after being called the supposed ‘victors’ were
not just robot bodies to them… but their own kind. It’s even sadder than normal human war because,
in this case, the robots didn’t have any choice: Atom, Gesicht, Heracles,
Montblanc… they were pitted against the robots that a rogue nation created.
They were forced to commit genocide against their own kind, without say or volition in the matter.
They were given enormous power, only for them to have to use it to slaughter their own race…
To punish a country for making weapons of mass destruction,
the rest of the world used those very same weapons against them. Is this peace? There is nothing more
futile, in my opinion, than that repeating cycle of hatred at the hands of humanity.
Osamu, in the original story, actually includes a quote about this addressing the 7 most powerful
robots, asking them: “When will they sit in judgment of the humans who created temporary life,
out of a limitless lust for power and control, and then destroyed it?”
An important detail to note about our 7 main robots is that- even though they experience
emotion- they don’t understand it. Heracles exists as a robot wrestler after the war but finds that
he can no longer bring himself to destroy his opponents, questioning whether this is what humans
call ‘pity’; Montblanc questions what he’s done as he sits upon a battlefield of corpses, feeling
what we might call ‘regret’; this is important because, we as readers, feel such compassion
towards these poor beings who’ve been manipulated into acting on the behalf of humans, feeling the
pain, sorrow, and hatred that come with it, but are unable to process it for what it is.
It’s how Urasawa paints the robots as the best characters in Pluto and his ability to
expose humanity for its horrors that creates one of the deepest stories I’ve ever read,
and one of the best ways to honor the legacy of the father of manga himself.
"[Astro Boy] has been enshrined as a centerpiece
in the literature of our generation" - Naoki Urasawa
Despite being a rehashing of an old story, Pluto still stands proud among Urasawa’s other manga
as an impressive piece of literature… it’s the kind of story where I think,
reading it multiple times, would greatly benefit anyone seeking to fully understand
its societal implications and message for the world. It is the perfect example
of what occurs when two of the greatest minds come together and make something truly beautiful.