My favorite show of 2023 was one I’d been waiting on for years. Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki’s 2003-2009 manga Pluto, a mature re-envisioning of “The Greatest Robot on Earth” arc from Osamu Tezuka’s classic Astro Boy, has long been a favorite of mine. Studio M2’s anime adaptation has been in the works since at least 2017 (before that, it was almost a movie from Minions studio Illumination — bullet dodged). After six years of waiting, it finally arrived on Netflix in October. The anime adapts its source material extremely faithfully, so it may come as a surprise that the original manga’s of-the-moment political commentary from 20 years ago is still startlingly relevant.
