Animated Shows ‘Pluto’ and ‘Invincible’ Point to a Better Way Forward for Sci-Fi

The release of Pluto on Netflix last month has attracted a lot of attention for being an Astro Boy reboot. This odd word choice appears across several publications, and feels out of step because Pluto itself, a darker, noir-styled adaptation of the Astro Boy story The Greatest on Earth, began twenty years ago and predates the whole trend of reboots. Indeed, to someone not familiar with the lore (and let’s face it, most native English speakers aren’t), Pluto isn’t obviously a different version of Astro Boy at all. They refer to the latter title character as Atom in Pluto proper, although even this is just a more appropriate romanization of the original Japanese name. This difference and obscurity begs the question, though– how much does it matter that Pluto is an alternate interpretation of Astro Boy?

To understand that, we need to consider the distinction between a multiverse and an alternate interpretation. The new season of Invincible, somewhat intriguingly, manages to do both at once possibly the only current work to use the multiverse to drive characterization rather than narrative. The new villain, Angstrom Levy, has access to knowledge of the multiverse–but rather than trying to use this knowledge for conquest, he’s a pacifist wanting to use it to better the world. The problem is, it turns out that first season of Invincible was a huge aberration compared to other possible versions. In most cases, the title character Invincible sides with the villain, his father Omni-Man, to essentially turn Earth into a colony of the Viltrumite Empire.

Invincible isn’t about the multiverse per se, in the way that Marvel adaptations tend to be. Rather, it just serves to demonstrate that people, even heroic ones, can end up making radically different life decisions that aren’t necessarily all that out of step with their personal beliefs. The Invincible show itself comes from the same man who created the comic, Robert Kirkman, who openly considers that comic to be flawed and the series a chance to fix those flaws. This is the big appeal of alternate universes, is how they allow us to envision how subtle changes to past events could improve our lives, make them worse, or even create something so different entirely as to be quite alien.

While the concept of the mutiverse has so thoroughly colonized popular science-fiction discourse, there’s surprisingly little fidelity to these ideas of meaningful change in part because corporate branded multiverse projects are less about new ideas as they are a way for gigantic media corporations to smash their various intellectual properties together for maximum profit, in theory anyway. It hasn’t worked out that well in practice, not that this has stopped them from continuing to try. We can probably thank Rick and Morty for making the idea trendy, although as originally presented in context, Rick and Morty used the multiverse idea more for farce more than epic pretensions.

And last week, in a frankly surprisingly effective full-circle alignment of that idea, season seven, episode five of Rick and Morty has the title character defeat his nemesis Rick Prime…and not really accomplish much of anything. In a particularly ironic touch, past more-speculation-than-screentime villain Evil Morty also makes an appearance, with a bored and deflated attitude throughout about how all the multiverse has done is magnify Rick’s narcissism. There’s a shockingly prescient metaphor there for how brands have overwhelmed the production of more original media, to the point that stuff like Pluto and Invincible feel fresh, despite being adaptations, because they come from this older sci-fi tradition where creators intended storytelling to be fluid, not authoritative.

There’s a Ship of Theseus aspect to a lot of the zombie brands, which have stripped away so much of the original compelling material so that ideas like the fact that the current iteration of The Simpsons is the “real” one feel a bit nonsensical. None of this stuff is real. It’s all fictional. And obsessively trying to connect to totemic markers of the past can’t compare to more timelessly relevant elements. It will baffle anyone expecting a new version of Astro Boy, or even a noir robot detective story, how half of the first episode of Pluto just deals with the relationship between a blind film composer and the robot who acts as his personal assistant.

The thematic importance of that whole story comes to peace with the resentments of the past, something that flows throughout Pluto. It feels like an oddly alien story today, mainly thanks to changing notions of artificial intelligence, with emphasis on emotional resonance rather than informational logic. But it’s nevertheless a compelling one, from its own unique world, an echo of another that can stand on its own without this explicit context.

Overall the autumn season has been quite a good one for more unusual animation that really requires the viewer sit down and pay attention to the text, as opposed to the metatext. The second season of the uploaded intelligence sci-fi show Pantheon came out…only in Australia and New Zealand, probably for tax reasons. Then there’s Scavengers Reign, with its creepy, frightening world of alternate evolution. The lesson we should be taking from the idea of multiverse is likewise to look for the utterly new. It’s pity that when it comes to the live-action counterparts, all we’re likely to see going forward is more and more obsessive nostalgia for the old.