Though it’s not a planet anymore, Pluto still deserves some love.
Every year, the Annecy International Animation Film Festival hosts the MIFA Film Market. This marketplace of ideas sees countless creators pitching their ideas to producers, distributors and financers in hopes of bringing their projects to fruition.
This year, Genco hosted their own booth at the market. Within, eagle-eyed folks spotted a poster for a potential anime adaptation of Pluto.
A second poster in Genco’s booth pitches a new Patlabor project, titled Patlabor EZY. As of now, no details on either project have been announced.
Pluto is based on Naoki Urasawa’s manga of the same name. The Eisner-award nominated project is based on a story arc from Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy manga, titled “The Greatest Robot on Earth.” Pluto ran in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Original from September 2003 through April 2009, and spanned eight collected volumes.
Viz Media holds the domestic rights to Pluto. They describe the series as:
In an ideal world where man and robots coexist, someone or something has destroyed the powerful Swiss robot Mont Blanc. Elsewhere a key figure in a robot rights group is murdered. The two incidents appear to be unrelated…except for one very conspicuous clue – the bodies of both victims have been fashioned into some sort of bizarre collage complete with makeshift horns placed by the victims’ heads. Interpol assigns robot detective Gesicht to this most strange and complex case – and he eventually discovers that he too, as one of the seven great robots of the world, is one of the targets.
Patlabor is an original anime and manga franchise from Headgear, a five-member group composed of Masami Yuki, Yutaka Izubuchi, Kazunori Itล, Akemi Takada, and Mamoru Oshii. The series includes a 22-volume manga series, several OVAs and theatrical films, and a TV anime series.
A live-action project, titled The Next Generation: Patlabor included a 13-episode TV drama series, which premiered in 2014, and theatrical film in 2015.
Patlabor was an influential series, which is seen as a formative title in the “Real Robot” sci-fi genre. Guillermo del Toro cites the series as a major influence in Pacific Rim.
Source: Twitter (OlivierFallaix)
