K-SCORE: 33
Director: Masaaki Yuasa
Writer: Ichiro Okouchi
“nightclub orgies are common sites for demons to rip apart people”
Starring: Griffin Burns, Kyle McCarley, Christina Vee
Spoiler Level: I tried for Major.
This show… this… thing… this miscreation of story… it’s not easy to describe. Here let me try. Devilman Crybaby seems to exist in a universe where everyone is trapped in a just-past-puberty conception of sexual frustration and violent tendencies, where each individual is given a dose of acid, aspirin, and steroids along with their morning breakfast of oven-roasted human tissue and chocolate milk. Half of all of these people are sociopaths, who can’t muster a single emotion regardless of whether or not the world is ending or their families are getting murdered. The other half are so emotional that they can only scream when they try to speak, and they cry at missteps in high school track meets. In this version of unreality, demons inhabit the souls of a large percentage of the populace, sociopath and crybaby alike. These things are monsters of no consistent, practical, or even singularly identifiable nature, but tend to look like the offspring of all the worst things Tim Burton, Roald Dahl, Pablo Picasso, and H.P. Lovecraft saw in their nightmares. They come in and out of the people sort of as robots come out of cars in Transformers and sort of as aliens come out of the chests of victims of facehuggers in that franchise.
In this place, this setting, time, and being, God exists as does Satan, (the latter is a pale-skinned angle man with large bare breasts) but neither have any goals for saving or destroying the world. They do, however, seem content to let it fall into the chaos inevitable to such circumstances. Nightclub orgies are common sites for demons to rip apart people and to be ripped apart by each other, but as are alleyways, aircraft carriers, cars, penthouse apartments, and stadiums. Machine guns are easily procured and frequently used by humans against humans, by demons against demons, and for demon on human combat. They are less effective than knives, which are less effective still than bare hands that tear flesh from crotch to neck. Nuclear warheads are launched in the chaos of this human-demon war, but these appear to be the least effective of all.
As to the story, the characters, the sense of development, the themes, the ideas explored - I cannot say much. I’m pretty sure there are two characters named Mikki. I think Satan is gay. And I know that at one point a little boy eats a dog in a parking lot, then turns into a slug and engulfs his mother’s head and torso. That… really stuck with me. But the various scenes of bloody, demonic, bacchanalia have a tendency to fly out of one’s head as soon as they vanish for they are all disconnected, brief, without context, without logical cohesion, and utterly insane.
The music is good. The art style of the anime is undeniably striking. If only if a potion like this, raw with creative freedom, uninhibited in its pursuit of ultimate peaks of pleasure and pain, could be brewed by someone who had his or her head on straight enough that he or she could follow a functioning narrative path. Alas, this is not even close. In a metaphor where a working story arc is a healthy adult person, Devilman Crybaby is the rotted remains of a coat-hanger abortion found in a dumpster three days after both would-be parents killed themselves.