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Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy is much darker and "deeper" until you really look at it, according to Pluto's Naoki Urasawa

Pluto might seem like a dark reimagining of Astro Boy's most iconic story arc, but Naoki Urasawa sees it as a faithful retelling of the manga's dark undertones.

Pluto Anime Screenshot — Image credit: Netflix

News by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Tue Mar 10 2026

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If you look at the world created by Osamu Tezuka, you would think that Astro Boy is a very simple, playful, childlike story. Astro Boy himself is an innocent android focused on discovering the true meaning of being human in what is often seen as a reimagining of the classic Pinocchio story. However, according to manga legend Naoki Urasawa, who illustrated and co-wrote the manga Pluto, Tezuka’s Astro Boy was never as innocent or light-hearted as we all think.

Naoki Urasawa would know; one of his iconic works, Pluto, was a reimagining of a key Astro Boy story arc, 'The Greatest Robot in the World.' In Urasawa’s version, the plot becomes a murder mystery story, with plenty of darker elements mixed in. Many praised it as being a departure from how Astro Boy is often viewed, but Urasawa claims he was just following the true tone of the source material.

“I think that the idea of Tezuka’s work being light-hearted is a common misconception,” Naoki Urasawa said in an interview. “His stories are actually very, very dark. I think when it’s been animated and adapted into many different formats, the general consensus about Tezuka’s work is that it is ‘pure’ and ‘family friendly.’ Astro Boy even aired on primetime TV in Japan. In this way, his work has sort of been reimagined as very wholesome and safe content, but if you really look at Tezuka’s work on a deeper level, it’s very dark. If you aim to properly adapt or remake any of Tezuka’s work, you will naturally end up with a very dark story.”

Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto might seem like a dark, gritty reimagining of Astro Boy, but the author himself just sees it as removing 70 years of sanitization from what was already a significantly dark storyline.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included...