Fairly frequently now, stage works come along proclaiming their debt to anime, manga or the graphic novel. Quite often the result is a bit of flashy tech and no real depth to the material. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s collaboration with Japan’s Bunkamura Theatre Cocoon, however, is as complex in its content as in its presentation. I’m referring not just to the narrative (which is set in a post-war future where humans and robots live together and involves, at various points, tulip fever in Iran and a hyperintelligent, flashing-eyed teddy bear named Dr Roosevelt), but also to its thematic preoccupations.

The comic-strip hero Atom (known in the west as Astro Boy) was created in post-WW2 Japan, where comics were less rigorously censored by the Americans than other media and so covert philosophical examinations could be engaged in. Pluto (originally created as a manga to mark Atom’s supposed date of birth in 2003) is a tale of what you might call cybernetic cleansing, with an assortment of human and robot/android characters, at worst, waging war on each other and, at best, trying to decipher what makes a person: emotions... like hate? Complex behaviour.... like lying?

The visual whizz-bangery is inescapable. Taiki Ueda has designed an intricate set in which an assortment of rostra and flown-in flats serve as furniture, landscape and comic-book frames on which graphics are projected (black and white apart from the occasional splash of blood). The visuals are so detailed that at one point, heaven knows how (but due somehow to Willy Cessa’s lighting), the piles of detritus downstage seem to flicker in and out of solid existence.

Moroccan-Belgian Cherkaoui’s background as a choreographer yields several interpretative dance sequences, but this is the first full-length theatre piece for which he has taken credit as director, and he integrates the movement beautifully into the proceedings. The dancers also serve as puppeteers for robot figures ranging from child-sized to behemoth, and flutter around android characters such as Mirai Moriyama’s Atom and Shunsuke Daitoh’s Gesicht, gesturally illustrating processor operations... or, more plainly, thoughts. It’s not perfect, but in a week of too-long shows, its three hours did not seem excessive, and it offers all too rare confirmation that genre work can succeed in theatre as more than mere novelty.

Written for the Financial Times.