I don't like how in Pluto all of the important robots look like humans. One of the greatest strengths of Tezuka's Astro Boy is the incredible character design for robots, especially in The Greatest Robot On Earth where each of the great robots has so much personality and uniqueness in their physical forms. Meanwhile Pluto makes all of them look perfectly human except for the two who die in the first episode. Yes, Brando and Hercules have their battle bodies, but Pluto really deemphasizes the fight scenes. So basically whenever our main robot cast is doing anything interesting it just looks like a bunch of guys.
Of course Tezuka had human-like robots too, but he knew when to use them and when not to. This is a manga about robots, why not actually SHOW us robots?
There's a weird direction taken where advanced enough AI is portrayed as basically mystical. Uran in particular has psychic empath powers where she can commune with animals and sense humans and robots in distress from across the city. But also, Pluto's original character, the creepy Hannibal Lecter robot, is able to intuit certain details of the outside world through very small details - he's able to magically pull the name "Pluto" through cultural imagery alone, before we learn about the actual character Pluto at all. Pluto himself also exhibits some sort of psychic sensitivity, and is able to control robot bodies with no AI installed in them, though that's more an application of his electromagnetic horns I think? I'm not sure, I'm only about halfway through, maybe I'll learn more.
There's a particular view of psychology where empathy and intuition are these, like, supernatural forces that the human psyche can tap into, which actually give us information that we couldn't get if we were purely relying on our senses. The idea that a hyper-advanced AI could use them more consciously and to greater effect than the human mind is an interesting one to me, even if I object to the base concept.
