On Tuesday, Shogakukan's website for the Big Comic series of magazines began listing the news that Naoki Urasawa's Pluto manga is going to be adapted into an animated series that will be available to watch online only on Netflix.
A Tweet from Tuesday that was posted by Netflix Animation but has since been deleted stated that Shinsh Fuji would play the role of Gesicht, Yko Hikasa would play Atom, and Minori Suzuki would play Uran in the anime. A launch date of 2023 was also mentioned in the tweet.
At the 2017 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, GENCO's pavilion at the MIFA film market had mentioned that the manga will be getting an anime adaptation; however, the anime was never formally announced. At the time, GENCO reported that Studio M2 was the company responsible for making the anime. When Masao Maruyama was employed at Madhouse Studios, he acted as a producer on anime adaptations of Urasawa's Monster, Master Keaton, and Yawara! manga. Now, he is the representative director at M2, where he is in charge of all production.
Urasawa and producer Takashi Nagasaki re-imagined the world that Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy comic showed as a seinen drama in the Pluto manga. Urasawa drew inspiration from Astro Boy. The manga was serialized in Shogakukan's Big Comic Original magazine between the years 2003 and 2009, and it has been collected into a total of eight book volumes. Manga has been localized into twenty languages and published in a variety of nations, among them are the United States and France.
Viz Media, which released the manga in North America, describes the story:
In a distant future where sentient humanoid robots pass for human, someone or something is out to destroy the seven great robots of the world. Europol's top detective Gesicht is assigned to investigate these mysterious robot serial murders - the only catch is that he himself is one of the seven targets.
In 2015, actress Mirai Moriyama portrayed the title role in a stage play adaption of the manga. In 2018, a second stage play adaption of the story was performed in Japan, and later that same year, it was performed internationally in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Belgium.
Tezuka Productions sold the film rights to Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment in 2010, with the intention of producing a live-action/computer-graphics (CG) hybrid film based on the character Pluto.
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