Netflix’s ‘Pluto’ Anime: Release Date, Trailer, Cast, Plot & More

Pluto is a manga by Naoki Urasawa, under the direction of Makoto Tezuka, assisted by Takashi Nagasaki. It was published from 2003 to 2009 in Shōgakukan’s Big Comic Original magazine and was compiled into a total of eight volumes. A deluxe edition of eight volumes was also released in Japan, including new covers and various bonuses. This series is a detective/thriller-style of narrative arc from Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy. Urasawa treats this story from the perspective of Gesicht, a robot detective who investigates the related murders of several robots and humans. An anime adaptation by studio Genco, in collaboration with Tezuka Productions and M2, is in production, and we are going to tell you everything about it in this article.

Pluto is an upcoming anime series based on a very popular manga of the same name; it has been in production since 2017. Although it was initially unknown when the series would be premiered, in February 2023, it was confirmed that the Pluto anime would premiere in 2023 and would be distributed by Netflix worldwide.

The rest of this article will bring you all the known and unknown information related to the upcoming first season of the enormously popular Plutomanga adaptation. You’ll find out about its potential release date, whether there is a trailer, what the story could be about, and much more about this great anime series.

Pluto release date

Naoki Urasawa was only four years old when he discovered, in June 1964, Astro Boy‘s “The Greatest Robot on Earth” and “The Artificial Sun” narrative arcs, which fascinated him so much that he began to draw, copying the characters into his notebooks and signing them under the name of the creator Osamu Tezuka. About forty years later, he resumed this work thanks to the son of the creator Makoto Tezuka, who entrusted him in 2003 with the story of the strongest robot in the world on the occasion of Astro Boy’s fictional birthday (born April 7, 2003, in the story).

Pluto was then published in the Japanese magazine Big Comic Original by the publisher Shōgakukan on September 9, 2003, and ended on April 5, 2009. In this series, especially the first volume, we dive back into the dark universe of Monster, written by the same author. Pluto is inspired by the famous Robot series by Isaac Asimov and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — renamed Blade Runner for its film adaptation — by Philip K. Dick.

On October 20, 2010, the American website Deadline New York announced that Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment had acquired the rights to adapt the manga into a film from Tezuka Productions. The film would be a mixture of 3D animation and live-action like Hop, a film that the same studio released in 2011. Since then, there has been no news of this project.

During the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2017, the animation studio Genco announced, through a poster, an adaptation of the manga into an animated series. In May 2022, after several years of silence, the founder and producer of Studio M20, Masao Maruyama, confirmed that the series was still in production. In February 2023, the Netflix platform announced that it would present the series this year, while the first voice actors were announced to be Shinshū Fuji as Gesicht, Yōko Hikasa as Astro, and Minori Suzuki as Uran. Currently, we do not have an official release window for the series.

Pluto trailer

You now know all the facts related to the Pluto premiere, which means you’ve probably deduced by yourselves that we already have a trailer for the Pluto anime adaptation. Contrary to common practice, the teaser trailer for the anime adaptation of Pluto was released roughly a year before the premiere, with very little to go on save for the trailer and the release year. You can check the trailer out for yourselves:

Pluto plot

At this moment, we do not know how far the first season of Pluto could take us because we don’t know how many chapters of the manga series the season could potentially adapt, nor do we know if there will be any future seasons. Namely, due to a lack of information in general, we have absolutely no clue how far the show’s first season might go if it even happens. An overview of the original material follows to get a rough idea of what you could expect from the series.

Someone (or something) is taking out the seven strongest robots on the planet (or, to put it as in the high-performance opera), those that could turn into weapons of mass destruction. In the era in which the story is set, the robots may have a humanoid appearance; they think in human terms and cultivate the same life expectancies. They can simulate most everyday human activities such as eating and drinking; they feel the need to get married, adopt robot children to satisfy parental impulses, and have a family in general

They ask themselves ethical questions, make dreams come true, and respect the environment. Furthermore, recent laws protect the rights of mechanical citizens, which not everyone approves of. Following the sci-fi thriller mechanism, the author kills artificial intelligence only after showing their intrinsic humanity. The killer leaves his signature at each crime scene: horns (scrap, pieces of wood, etc.) on the victims’ heads, a symbol of Pluto, the Roman deity of the underworld. It’s up to Inspector Gesicht, one of the seven strongest robots in the world and a member of Europol, to investigate.

Pluto cast and characters

It’s still too early for us to discuss the upcoming anime adaptation of Pluto in terms of cast and characters simply because no one has revealed any official information as of the time of writing. Based on that, we are going to prepare you for the upcoming information by giving you a list of all the most important characters in the series so you know whom you can expect to see: