You need to watch Pluto on Netflix, a small miracle of a show

polygon.com:

A crucial part of the Netflix experience is seeing something incredible debut on the service with basically no fanfare. It could be the best thing Netflix has ever done or the worst, almost all of it gets the same treatment: A trailer on YouTube and a spot on the queue right between Wednesday and Too Hot to Handle. It happens all the time — but don’t let it happen to Pluto, the anime miniseries that premiered on the streamer Thursday. Pluto is incredible. It’s a wonder the series even exists.

Pluto is a bit of a unicorn in the manga world. Created by Naoki Urasawa in collaboration with Takashi Nagasaki and the estate of Osama Tezuka via his son, Macoto Tezuka, the series is a mature retelling of Tezuka’s Astro Boy story “The Greatest Robot on Earth.” While this kind of revisitation is the norm in American comics and pop culture, in manga it’s far less common, and this is before you account for Tezuka’s stature in the medium.

The gutsiness of remaking Astro Boy this way will always get a little lost in translation — I’m not sure I fully grasp it, but I imagine it’s something like HBO making a Twin Peaks-level miniseries starring Mickey Mouse. You know: A beloved all-ages icon, rendered for a new generation by a master storyteller who largely makes things for adults, while still, somehow, being reverent and faithful to the spirit of the all-ages character being reinvented! It’s a mind-boggling thing to attempt, but from 2003 to 2009 the Pluto manga somehow pulled it off, one month at a time.

Pluto on Netflix is a beautiful tribute to Urasawa and Nagasaki’s comic: a lavish, unhurried, and faithful translation of the eight-volume manga. Arriving six years after it was first announced, and thought abandoned for a time, Pluto