Image via Viz Media

After years of silence about the anime adaptation of Naoki Urasawa’s award-winning Pluto manga, Studio M2 founder and producer Masao Maruyama confirmed in a Twitter reply today that the series is still happening and that the staff “are working hard on it.”

The Pluto anime was originally announced at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2017, revealing that Maruyama’s Studio M2 was to produce the series. Maruyama had previously produced the Monster and Master Keaton anime adaptations at MADHOUSE, both of which adapted Urasawa’s manga series of the same name. Other than a teaser poster, no other details on the Pluto anime have been announced since 2017.

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Viz Media has released all eight volumes of the Pluto manga in English, describing the first volume as such:

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.

It may be a while yet until we hear more about the Pluto anime, but it’s exciting to know that it’s still being worked on!

Source: Masao Maruyama on Twitter

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Daryl Harding is a Japan Correspondent for Crunchyroll News. He also runs a YouTube channel about Japan stuff called TheDoctorDazza, tweets at @DoctorDazza, and posts photos of his travels on Instagram.