Netflix’s New ‘Pluto’ Borrows the Politics of ‘Astro Boy’

Writer Caroline Cao offers a primer on the cartoony war and racism politics in 'Astro Boy,' and how they show up (and don't) in the new anime

"Pluto" takes place in a neo-futuristic world where humans and high-functioning robots co-exist.

Courtesy of Netflix

Words by Caroline Cao

This article features depictions of racist caricatures and war imagery.

To engage in the themes featured in these works, the article contains light spoilers for Astro Boy and Pluto.

What does it mean for robots to become “human” in the age of evolving artificial intelligence? What is the “perfectly human” AI? Though that’s a very current topic of conversation, the source material for the new Netflix anime Pluto is a 2003 manga that grapples with questions of love, hate, and robot-human co-existence. Then and now, it’s a cyber-noir murder-mystery, where both content and graphics are decidedly intended to resonate with adults. And yet, it’s also based on a 1950s cartoony robot boy with a buttgun.

Of course, I’m talking about the influential Astro Boy (known as “The Mighty Atom” in Japanese), brainchild of mangaka-animator and pioneering Godfather of Manga and Anime Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989). Astro’s origin story, adapted in Tezuka's 1963 black-and-white anime, operates like an intriguing Twilight Zone parable written for children, followed by imaginative tales once Astro confronts conflicts between humans and robots. From Tezuka’s kid-targeted Astro Boy or his adult-oriented Buddha and Black Jack works, modern Western readers may scratch their heads at Tezuka’s signature silliness, but these habits have settled as his trademarks.

A panel depicting Astro Boy's origins.

Courtesy of Dark Horse

To understand Pluto, one must better understand Astro Boy—and its politics. Having grown up a Vietnamese American millennial discouraged from reading comics (because they were perceived as inferior to school books in the eyes of my father), I wasn’t intimately aware of Astro Boy’s cultural significance. Had I known about the robot’s Grimms-like backstory (built to replace a dead child, then sold to a circus when he didn’t act human enough), I would have splashed into the manga much earlier. Discovering Astro Boy now, as presumably many will after watching Pluto (animated by Studio M2), it’s impossible not to cringe at its dated depictions of race and politics. In the hands of illustrator-writer Naoki Urasawa and co-writer Takashi Nagasaki, Pluto has neutralized the cartooniness of Astro Boy, taking a popular (and dark to begin with) Astro Boy manga story “The Greatest Robot on Earth” and retelling it as a seinen (or grown-up) manga, with the supervision of Tezuka Productions (the anime studio founded by Tezuka in 1968). Here, the Astro Boy incarnation, named “Atom” (English voice by Laura Stahl in the anime), doesn’t have his Disney-esque cartoon design or his buttgun. But despite de-cartoonifying its veneer, Pluto owes plenty to Astro Boy’s earlier audacity with anti-war and race themes.

The Anti-War Message in Astro and Pluto

While the original 1964 Astro Boy “The Greatest Robot on Earth” did not incorporate a war (though Urasawa suggested that the story was influenced by the Cuban Missile Crisis), Pluto underlines Tezuka’s anti-war perspective by linking the murderers’ motives to the aftermath of a “39th Central Asian Conflict.” Pluto the manga was published in September 2003 (running until 2009), months after President George Bush waged the war in Iraq in a search for weapons of mass destruction. An unsubtle indictment of the Iraq War, the 39th Central Asian Conflict involved the “United States of Thracia” waging war on “Persia.” The Conflict is a source of guilt and PTSD flashbacks for ex-military robot characters of various nationalities, many of them reckoning with their war machine status and some engaging in restorative actions for Persia.

This Iraq War allegory mirrors Astro Boy borrowing from the current events of the time. In Volume 6’s 1967 “Angel of Vietnam” story, Astro Boy is time-traveled back into…the 1960s where a Vietnamese village is besieged by U.S. warplanes.

You also can’t acknowledge Pluto without wincing at the Astro Boy source material, which casts an Orientalist-based Sultan as the villain. The more serious Pluto scrubs away cartoony caricatures, with the Sultan reimagined as the dictator Darius XIV (English voiced by Zuhair Haddad), an “obvious Saddam Hussein clone” in the words of one manga reviewer. Darius’s antagonism is also counterbalanced with the connivance of President Alexander (English voice by Kiff VandenHeuvel) of the United States of Thracia, the guilty party of occupation. Crucial to the storytelling, Pluto also re-defines the other Astro Boy cast members as Persian war victims and complicated tragic figures, starting with Dr. Abullah (English voice by Kamran Nikhad) and the Persian human-like robot Sahad (English voice by Sean Rohani). Pluto makes it clear that the Thracia invasion is the root of the misery and murders.

In a stroke of cartoony folklore, the ghosts of Astro Boy enact vengeance on U.S. warplanes for their massacre of Vietnamese people.

Courtesy of Dark Horse

The Sultan in "Astro Boy."
Astro Boy enacting retribution on American bombers with his buttgun. Images courtesy of Dark Horse

Robots as the racial othered

In exploring the uncertain place robots have among human society, Pluto features an anti-robot faction modeled after white nationalism (with a human adherent sharing the namesake of Tezuka’s WWII-manga Adolf): “a far-right group demanding the elimination of robot civil rights laws...They're like a modern version of the Ku Klux Klan.” Quick note: Though the anime cuts this line, it’s still hamfisted.

KKK-like hoods and Nazi salutes in the "Pluto" manga.

Courtesy of VIZ Media LLC

The hoods in "Pluto."

Courtesy of Netflix

But where did the “robotic racial other” metaphor come from? Well, the Astro Boy manga and its two Tezuka-era cartoons (1963 and 1980) treated robotic-ness as a metaphor for the othered, the racial other included. The topical boldness overlaps with shaky grounds (like how the mutants of the Western-based X-Men have been read as dated metaphors for racism and homosexuality). This “robotic racial other” crops up in the Astro Boy Volume 7 "The Tragedy of Bailey" story: A Japanese American immigrant, Mr. Hoh, has built solidarity with the robotic civil rights movement, tying their struggles to those of Japanese immigrants and Black persons in the United States.

A human explains anti-robot violence in the United States.

Courtesy of Dark Horse

In his own way, Tezuka refused to sugarcoat the seriousness of white supremacy for his young Japanese readers. White nationalists murder Bailey, the robot who registered to be recognized as human. Subsequently in Volume 8 “Declaration of Robot Rights,” they also assassinate Mr. Hoh and his robot fiancée for pursuing a human-robot intermarriage (in a metaphor for miscegenation).

'By the latter half of the 20th century, whites started treating us [Japanese immigrants like me] better, but they still acted horribly to Black people.'

It should be noted in a panel that renounces racism, it illustrates a big-lipped Black caricature as an anonymous victim of anti-Black racism. Tezuka’s intentions of anti-hate don’t always land, likely learning to draw from American cartoons' legacy of caricaturing Black persons. And this is scratching the surface of Tezuka’s knotty illustrations of Black and Indigenous characters (including his works like Black Jack, which attempts to explore anti-Blackness in America) as well as the wider prevalence of anti-Black characterization in anime and manga discussed by Black anime fans.

A panel depicting American racism.

Courtesy of Dark Horse

In the English-translated printing of Astro Boy (translated by Frederik L. Schodt) dating back to their 2002 publication, Tezuka Productions and Dark Horse Comics feature a “Note to Readers”: “people from Africa and Southeast Asia…depicted very differently from the way they actually are today, in a manner that exaggerates a time long past, or shows them to be from extremely undeveloped lands.” The disclaimer reads as a well-intentioned but dated message that reduces the offense as marginalized people who “feel” this way: “We believe that as long as there are people who feel insulted or demeaned by these depictions, we must not ignore their feelings.”

It does correctly note that bowdlerization wouldn’t help; Tezuka’s racial caricatures should not be erased.

Though updating its sensibilities, Pluto can’t always escape the clunkiness of its politics, starting with the dated “anti-robot KKK.” In addition, a particular Volume 8 sequence delivers an exotic, romanticized depiction of Indigenous persons, even as it arguably frames their marginalization as a consequence of colonization. Being a near-faithful adaptation, the anime does little to reframe the scene as well.

Knowing these shouldn’t dissuade you from viewing Pluto and exploring its Astro Boy roots. If anything, diving into Astro—the progressive and the problematic—can allow us to be more curious about how we can tell sci-fi stories of anti-hate, anti-war as well as redress past mistakes. It’s too easy to glance at Astro Boy’s cute surface and underestimate how confrontational the manga was for its child readers. Pluto lays bare its Astro Boy DNA, connecting the human condition to real-life politics.

Pluto is streaming on Netflix.

Published on October 27, 2023

Words by Caroline Cao

Caroline Cao is an NYC-based writer. A queer Vietnamese American woman, she also won’t shut up about animation and theatre. She likes ramen, pasta, and fanfic writing. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter @Maximinalist.