AWN’s anime columnist Andrew Osmond looks at 2 intricate mystery-thriller anime serials on Netflix: the real-world drama ‘Monster,’ inspired by ‘The Fugitive,’ and the sci-fi ‘Pluto,’ about the humanity of robots.
Following my column last week on Dennoh-Coil, an outstanding 2007 series available on Netflix, I’ve opted to cover another “old” title on the same platform, the thriller series Monster, which dates from 2004. However, I’ll discuss it alongside a newer anime on Netflix, Pluto, released in 2023.
They’re stand-alone stories, but with close connections, based on manga by the same artist, Naoki Urasawa. Both anime stay true to Urasawa’s characteristic designs – beautified realism, with dimensional figures and impressive noses.
Both titles have protagonists who are haunted investigators, though the narratives can leave them behind to build up side characters, troubled figures who can be despicable yet heroic.
Monster and Pluto also share real backdrops. Monster is set in a turbulent Europe after the Berlin Wall fell. Pluto is set in a parallel world, but from Part 2, it’s glaringly obvious that Urasawa is commenting on a real conflict. He began the manga in 2003, and he’s depicting the war that year, when the U.S., supported by Britain, invaded Iraq to remove its ruler Saddam Hussein, causing years of chaos and bloodshed.
Of the two anime, Monster requires far more viewer investment – it runs 74 episodes, or around 30 hours of viewing. Pluto’s less taxing, though it’s still a long story, told in eight extended episodes around an hour each. This column will hopefully offer a useful primer on both, starting with Monster.
Birth of the Monster
“My publisher was adamant it just wouldn’t do well,” recalled Urasawa when he visited London in 2019. “They really tried to stop me.”
Monster is a psycho-thriller, though it’s never centered on the “psycho” or his atrocities. The series spends more time in the heads of its many other characters, who are nearly all adults. The story doesn’t go to Japan; the Japanese hero wanders Europe, always the foreigner. Many anime depict near-futures. Monster is grounded in the near-past, after the Wall came down, amid the ghosts of state communism and the experiments in its name.
The story starts as a straight thriller. Doctor Tenma is a brilliant neurosurgeon, whose glorious future career is mapped out already. That’s thanks to the director at his hospital, who’s the father of Tenma’s fiancée; both dad and daughter are delighted at snagging a prodigy.
Tenma may be a medical genius, but he’s a company man now, and the series opens as he realizes what that means. His job is to save the lives of the wealthy and influential. “People’s lives are not created equal,” his fiancée tells him point blank as they dine at a five-star restaurant.
That rule is tested when a boy is brought into the hospital one night. His parents have been murdered, and the boy himself has a gunshot wound to the head. As Tenma prepares to operate, he’s told to switch to a more important patient, the local mayor. Tenma disagrees, saves the boy instead, and finds himself frozen out by everyone who supported him. In a fit of temper, Tenma ends up ranting beside the (apparently) sleeping child, saying that if anyone deserves to die, it’s his boss.
Then the boy disappears. So does his twin sister who we’ve glimpsed in a state of shock, repeating “Kill him.” The boss indeed dies, and a wave of killings sweeps the country.
When I interviewed Urasawa, he mentioned disliking whodunnits. It’s clear inside the first few episodes that the boy, Johan, is indeed the killer. A timeskip turns him into a satanically beautiful youth, seen in shadow as he carries out another execution, before appearing smiling from those shadows like a classic movie icon.
Tenma, as Monster’s brilliant opening titles make clear, is doomed to be hunter and hunted. Framed for one of Johan’s crimes, he goes on the run, desperately seeking the monster he brought back to life. But Johan is more than a serial killer. Tenma encounters his far-right disciples who revere him as their guru. He also unearths Johan’s drawn-out schemes to enter his victims’ lives, more artful than his killings. Johan’s origins are a maddening mystery, leading to a ruined mansion from a Lovecraft story, and into the pages of a children’s picture book about a fiend with no name.
But for all this, Monster isn’t centered on Johan. The story proceeds by introducing and exploring a long succession of characters; many have demons but few are demonic. A man frantically tries to shield his wife and child from his criminal past. Later, a hitman falls for a truly fallen woman, in one of the best anime takes on film noir outside of Jin-roh.
From The Fugitive to Black Lagoon
The “doctor on the run” set-up was influenced by The Fugitive, an American live-action TV series from the 1960s which inspired the 1993 film with Harrison Ford. The original series was a hit in Japan; Urasawa watched it when he was about eight. But while the Fugitive template is plain in many early Monster episodes, with Tenma often stopping to help strangers without judgement, the later episodes run more like a conspiracy or gangster show.
At times you may think of the 1978 paranoid movie The Boys from Brazil (and that’s not a spoiler, as Monster solves its mystery very differently). In anime, Johan’s obsession with the human death drive has shades of one of the bleakest anime films, Genocidal Organ, while another central plotline recalls the lurid “Vampire Twins” storyline in the series Black Lagoon. But Monster leavens the darkness with determined humanity, refusing to slide into the nihilist grand guignol that you expect in horror anime.
There are missteps, especially in the show’s first third. Lines and moments can feel laughably on the nose, like the fiancée’s “not created equal” comment. The episodes in the late 20s take a dangerous step; they start what seems like an entirely different story with new characters, whose purpose only becomes clear slowly. The show asks for patience as well as investment. But there’s a grand set-piece climax at the show’s halfway mark, topped by another in the last episodes.
Many questions are answered at the end; not all of them, but the omissions aren’t sequel bait. Some are left dangling playfully; other questions may have implicit answers. For example, there’s a police investigator who imagines what it’s like to be a murderer. He’s familiar if you’ve read Thomas Harris, but it’s implied that Johan is as good as imagining what it’s like to be an ordinary person, to lethal ends.
The presentation is overwhelmingly solid. The adult physicality of the characters is faithful to Urasawa’s designs, adapted by Kitaro Kosaka, a veteran Ghibli artist. The animation is functional at worst, but there are beautiful shots; Monster doesn’t specialize in fights but rather in emotional distress. It was animated by the Madhouse studio, which had made an adult psycho-thriller previously, Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue. Monster’s director, Masayuki Kojima, has since moved on to another dark epic, Made in Abyss.
Pluto’s parallel world
Urasawa finished the Monster manga in 2001, starting Pluto only a couple of years later. Pluto is a largely self-explanatory story, with a clear start and end. However, it’s also a spinoff of sorts, as I’ll explain.
It’s set in a futuristic, high-tech world – the in-series details indicate this is an alternative timeline, though some particulars are close to our history. In this world, humans and manmade robots coexist, and the rights of robots are recognized, in theory. The reality is different. For instance, in Part 1, a “dead” robot’s body is casually junked, seen as no more than scrap.
Gesicht, the protagonist, is a policeman, an inspector from “Europol.” He’s an unassumingly handsome hero in Daniel Craig mode, and he’s a robot. For a while, you might wonder if his beautiful, supportive wife is a robot too; I’ll be spoilery and say yes. Gesicht investigates a series of killings where hornlike props were found at the crime scenes. These may be linked to far more world-shaking assassinations. World-famous robot celebrities are being destroyed, with more horn signatures left behind.
The journey of Gesicht will take him to multiple countries and further mysteries, some involving him. (For example, he’s one of only a few robots who have dreams, and they’re bad.) On a trip to Japan, Gesicht meets the most famous robot of all – Atom, who looks and talks like a preteen boy, but who has the powers and ethos of a superhero, making him a potential target. And yet Atom is more affected by meeting Gesicht. He excuses himself in the middle of their conversation, goes into a toilet and bursts into tears.
The Tezuka connection
Atom is a version of the Japanese hero better known in America as Astro Boy, created in the 1950s by Osamu Tezuka. (His manga’s Japanese name was Mighty Atom.) You don’t need to know Astro Boy before watching Pluto, but it’s worth knowing that Pluto’s set in a pre-established world. It’s like an American comic set in Superman’s Metropolis, though Pluto often keeps its boy of steel off-screen. The specific plot of Pluto – the serial killings of great robots – is adapted from a 1964 Astro Boy storyline, “The Greatest Robot on Earth.”
Atom, or Astro Boy, has had numerous animated incarnations through the decades. This is what he looked like in 1963.
One thing worth knowing at the outset is Atom’s origin story, which is widely known in Japan, and becomes important in Pluto’s later episodes. Pluto reveals the details piecemeal, but here’s the summary. Atom was created to replace a real boy – Tobio, who was killed in a traffic accident. His father was a brilliant scientist, Doctor Tenma. Maddened by grief, he created Atom in the hope he could recreate Tobio. (The fact Tenma shares his name with the hero of Monster may be an homage on Urasawa’s part, though the two doctors have only their brilliance in common.)
But Atom, marvel that he was, was still a robot, not the son Tenma lost. The Pluto anime includes a painful flashback where Tenma and Atom are at dinner, with Atom giving enthused answers to Tenma’s questions about his day… Answers that aren’t remotely what Tobio would have given.
Tenma was rejected by a furious Tenma and ended up a circus freak. But he was saved by another scientist, the portly and saintly Doctor Ochanomizu, who does treat Atom like his son. Ochanomizu plays his own important part in Pluto. So does Uran, a little robot girl created for Atom to be his impetuous, annoying, totally loyal sister.
One extra point of interest is that part of this backstory – an artificial child rejected by his human creator, who’d hoped to recreate his own dead son – would inspire Guillermo del Toro. Talking at London’s BFI Southbank in January 2023, the director acknowledged Astro-Boy as an influence on his Oscar-winning stop-motion film, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. There’s no similar backstory in the original Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi.
A Magnificent Epic
The Pluto anime is animated by Studio M2. This studio was founded in 2016 by Masao Maruyama, who also co-founded Madhouse back in the ‘70s and the MAPPA studio in 2011. Among his myriad credits, Maruyama also produced the Madhouse-animated Monster.
I found M2’s version of Pluto magnificent. Viewed with dispassionate objectivity, the kind you’d expect from the grave Geischt, the anime has uneven parts; like Monster, it can be unsubtly on-the-nose in its storytelling. But it’s fantastically entertaining, nearly eight hours of sustained cinematic sumptuousness, mixing superhero tropes and stormy sky-battles with conspiracy thrillers and ground-level humanity.
Though artificial, Gesicht is the most human of all, with a shy but warm relationship with his robot wife. Other robots bond compassionately with humans – Part 1 shows a robot ex-soldier caring for an angry decrepit composer in a lonely Scottish castle, with a shockingly moving moment where the robot breaks into throaty song. Some robots, like Gesicht, look wholly human. Others look anything but, which plays horrible tricks with our empathy in the darkest scenes. There’s a haunting moment when a tiny “inhuman” robot stumbles faltering towards its parents, and suddenly seems like a completely human infant; Pinocchio in a second.
As mentioned earlier, the plot stirs in barely-disguised real history in its backstory of a criminally immoral war in the Middle East. It’s breathtaking when an all-too familiar figure turns up in a small but key role, resurrected from the headlines of 20 years ago. Pluto recalls Watchmen in its real-world details, its human scale and in in its story of “superhero” characters targeted in a conspiracy past their comprehension, though Pluto resolves very differently.
Actually, it has two endings. One is a shattering, film noir scene by a rainy canal. After that, the series goes to more familiar places for anime, pouring in vintage action images, retro fanservice. This can seem like a cop-out, even as the script strives to reconcile the different kinds of story it’s telling, like Watchmen fighting the idealistic Superman stories of the 1930s.
There are passed-up chances; it looks briefly like the series could do something terrific with two of its female characters, and it’s a terrible let-down when they step back. But the ending’s honest, and it’s beautiful thematically and visually. It’s lovely to see two robot warriors resting side by side on rocky ground, before they zoom off to a cataclysm that’ll shake Earth to its roots.
