PLUTO
What a sluggish hellfest. Not that Pluto is a bad anime, but there is something corny about these overambitious 1h episodes then being slow and a bit underwhelming but always promising to make a big, deep revelation. A stretched Mecha-romp which would give a twelve year old some satisfaction, but no decent 17year old or adult will call it cool without haven fallen into its traps of appropriation, copying style and gravitas borrowed from other classics. It just takes too much time to home in a rather simple plot, setting out as a complicated crime story, almost a noir – which works well for about three episodes. Two. And one bad guy taking out all the good guys, picking them off one by one, no matter how strong they seemed. Always the same outcome, so what is the point. FastFwd to Astroboy, please!
Ghost in the Shell? Serial Experiments Lain? Neon Genesis Evangelion? All those had a vision, a theme more than sythetic life becoming more than human in being super-human – they made the characters relatable, vulnerable. In Pluto our main interests all die, one by one, no chance – and no one has an idea why. That is not interesting, but depressing. All seems to be coalesced around the screenwriter Ubukata, but even though much of the sequence is written somebody read that an d animated it – painstakingly. Just contest the drame early on, please.
For Moonrise Ubukata is getting slayed on Reddit (I disagree, that is actually quite good, IMHO), with the slowly developing Pluto / Astroboy revival people were still more favourable and lenient. „Yeah, I remember that thread about Netflix “BURYING” this incredible project and how tragic it was. But unlike with something such as Pluto, when this came out, the people who were watching it were saying it sucks. That thread looks so awkward now.“ Well it doesn`t because it sucks. It is not a revival, it is a burial. There is no limited series Anime I fell more asleep to. Nice try, but please, no. Not for me.
Ghost in the Shell: SAC 2045 Sustainable War
What starts out as a military infused Cyberpunk 2077 rip-off is still a much more valuable pearl at the core, than e.g. the generic slow mecha spectacle Pluto. What goes wrong in Cyberpunk is straightened out by a much more complex plot where the original GITS atmosphere is sacrificed a bit for the critique of post-modern PR-wars, money ruling the planet’s social grid and limitations and the rightful amount of somber mercenary contractors who would do literally anything to achieve a mission goal – if the mission gets accepted. But the project co-directed by Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series) and Shinji Aramaki (APPLESEED series) emerges as a solid but not thrilling rewiring of known tropes, still it reached me through the bigger world implications and references which describe something about our “cyberpunk” world. The premise hits eerily home in 2026 when the full blow attack of tech bros becoming tech robber barons building Robot factories and bunkers for themselves becomes a dire reality in plain open sight. We are expendable, but no benevolent, AI powered robot hit squad in sight. Only the dumb kung fu robot army version which first steals your data, your white collar creative jobs and then checks you for IDs on the street. We are almost there….
Season 02 – its just so strange how the tone of the intro/extro gets tuned back to a SAC (Stand Alone Complex, the last Ghost In The Shell animated series from 2002-2003) feel, without emulating it well, neither with the shallow music nor with the pacing/flow, it rather feels like a fan service to the franchise. The Major plunging headfirst also was what Scarlett Johansson’s reboot was hung upon (sigh). It lacks inspiration and an original visual idea – season one was in retrospect better, lighter, more mysterious, even the music stuck somehow. The posthuman foe may wiggle acrobaticly as she wants, we are not getting the tension of a brush with god, even as she sends in an entire airplane. The amped up assistant also feels a tad out of character, as she does not learn how to use the Tachikomas in proficient way over night, or go against a posthuman herself. No no no. Too far fetched, when the Major was out of her league… but at least the action was not as boring as waiting for something interesting or atmospheric to happen, like in PLUTO. So, enough of PLUTO bashing…
Boring Boy vs. AI Bullet Dancing 0:1