Netflix (2023)

Trailer available here

There should have been a point in time when I just accepted that I was not enjoying watching Pluto. The Netflix animated series was based around how robots were created in a way that would not allow them to kill humans but there was resentment towards robots for their use in war and some having special skills.

It focused on one particular robot, Atom, that was supposed to represent a child and have an incredible wealth of human like qualities and emotions and when activated in a certain way could cause a whole world of potential destruction. To do so though involved a set of other events to happen first and whilst all these events made sense and followed each other well it still just all felt rather muddled and not very well put together.

Something just felt like it was missing. Like it desperately wanted to tell people of some sort of tale about the way the human race is going, a political statement or something about the development of AI, rather than it merely being a show about robots vs humans but it never got there at all. It just failed over and over and I kept waiting for it to get better and hoped that eventually the ending would make it all worth it but it was not.

Given that it is an adaptation of Naoki Urasawa and Osamu Tezuka’s PLUTO perhaps they just tried to cram too much into too few episodes, given it was more of a mini-series, and that would certainly explain the feeling of it having potential. Somebody somewhere clearly believed in it enough to take the time to convert it for the screen but it really did just get lost in translation.

One of those bitterly disappointing Netflix animations that you end up wishing they hadn’t bothered to produce at all.