This Week in Anime - Just How Insane is Devilman Crybaby?

I literally stayed up 28 hours so I could mainline the whole thing the second it dropped on Netflix. Which in hindsight was probably a bad idea but goddammit I've been waiting for Masaaki Yuasa's Devilman for what feels like years.

Before we get into the show itself I wanted to ask, do you have any previous experience with Go Nagai material?

I'm in a similar boat. I've read a few of his original manga, your Devilmens and Cutie Honeys and whatnot, but weirdly I don't think I can ever say I've been a fan of his stuff. As a creator, I find him fascinating both for his influence on the industry and culture of anime, and learning about his history as a writer is really interesting, but I hesitate to call anything he made himself "good" in the traditional sense.

And god bless him for it. If there's anybody I trusted to bring Devilman to the modern era, it's the director of Kemonozume and Mind Game!

Yeah, before we get to the show proper we should probably mention that this will easily be the most NSFW show we'll probably ever cover on TWIA.

But don't worry, we've taken it upon ourselves to keep our screenshots PG here.

With the disclaimers out of the way I guess we should also lay out the basic premise. Akira Fudo, the world's softest boy, is just your average high school guy who cries at the drop of a hat.

One day his childhood friend Ryo pulls up in a sports car and tells him "get in loser, we're going demon hunting."

Ryo is...shall we say eccentric.

Anyway, turns out some demons from primordial times have awakened and want to destroy humanity to reclaim earth, and the only people who can stop them are Ryo and the pure-hearted Akira, who is such a ball of empathy that he could potentially fuse with a demon to gain its powers without losing his human heart.

The ritual for this involves going to a rave and, well, did I say Ryo was eccentric?

And from there many, many bloody hijinks ensue as Akira tries to balance being an otherworldly assassin monster with being a high school kid who's suddenly a foot taller, as strong as a bodybuilder, and hornier than Zeus.

He handles it well, all things considered.

Literally. Like if you ever wanted an anime that portrays The Book of Revelation, Crybaby's got you covered.

Yeah, while the plot beats are mostly the same as the original Devilman, Crybaby makes pretty massive changes to the execution. From totally restructuring the middle of the story to straight up creating new characters for the anime, this is very much its own beast, and honestly I'm grateful for it. To be frank, I find the original Devilman kind of empty on its own. It's in many ways still shocking in just how graphic and nihilistic its final chapters get, but it's also got a lot of ideas that have been done better by people it later inspired. Crybaby seems aware of this and decides to completely reinvent many of Devilman's themes to try and mine something - anything - new from the material. And I think it ends up succeeding.

Oh how did I know you'd like the problematic lesbian.

Granted, putting "problematic" in front of anything in Devilman is redundant. But yes, Miko's story is an interesting addition. In the original, there really aren't characters besides Akira and Ryo. Everyone else is there for plot points or to give Akira something to protect. But with Miko and some other characters, we get a different perspective on the demonic transformations at the center of the show.

For the record I am still adamantly anti-monster girl.

But yeah, Miko's a really great change that helps give Crybaby its own identity and makes this story work on its own. I also love that they replaced the cartoony banchou thugs with a group of soundcloud rappers.

Helps that they got actual Japanese rappers to voice them! Now I'll be disappointed if Cutie Honey Universe doesn't feature a rapping Greek chorus for its story too.

But the biggest change to the original manga is right there in the title: Crybaby. Turns out, even with all his demonic super powers and blood lust and projectile sexual frustration, the one thing that doesn't change in Akira is his empathy. After he becomes a literal killer, he still has the ability to feel sadness for others - including the demons he fights - and the show insists that this is what makes him a hero.

It's a surprisingly sincere ode to emotional vulnerability in a show that's packed with sleaze and brutality that I honestly was not expecting. Like, if anything was going to embody brainless machismo, you'd think it would be a hyperviolent blood orgy from the '70s, but here the show insists that the power of empathetic tears is what could save the world.

It's also basically the one thing that saves the finale for me, if I'm being honest. Going into Crybaby I had one question, and that was how in the hell were they going to handle that ending. Like, the Devilman manga's ending is such an infamous, unflinching downer of a conclusion that it's literally never been adapted by any of the series' anime or spinoffs before.

So after the world has thoroughly gone to hell in a handbasket, we find out that not only are Devils real, so is God! And he's pissed. Like, turn half a continent into pillars of salt pissed.

I KNEW WE COULDN'T TRUST THE CAT.

And the bombshells somehow only ramp up after Literally Lucifer, because by god does this armageddon story commit. Absolutely everyone dies - Miki, Miko, their family and friends, EVERYONE ends up dead at the hands of paranoid mobs or government-sanctioned demon-eradication soldiers who would rather pull a trigger than wait for any sort of understanding. It's a pretty damn demoralizing penultimate episode that's as moving as it is absolutely brutal, and if the show had gone out like the manga, I'd honestly have felt rather ticked off by it all.

This all leads up to the final confrontation between Akira and Ryo, both leading their own armies of demons in a bid for who gets to rule over the scraps of habitable earth still remaining, and this is where we find out why Ryo did all this to begin with. Turns out, he'd originally planned to destroy humanity more or less the same way, but in his time living as a human with Akira, even Satan himself ended up finding just a bit of a human heart. So he ended up concocting a plan to fuse Akira with a demon so that he'd be strong enough to survive among the new order and they could be together. But Akira ends up refusing, choosing to side with his own definition of humanity and fight it out against him.

That final scene was something I never really thought could be properly adapted for a new audience.

It's literal, actual, factual, Morning Star Satan McLucifer, carrying on a conversation with the bisected corpse of his love, right before God rains down holy destruction upon the entire planet. It's as bleak an ending as I've ever seen, and I genuinely thought that it would only ever be notable for how bonkers it is as an ending. But then, at the very end, Satan Himself weeps over Akira. The embodiment of destruction cries because he's known love and now knows sorrow, just before the world itself ceases to be.

It's as bizarrely poetic a conclusion as you can get, and it's what ultimately clinched that I love Devilman Crybaby.

It's a series that's likely to get a strong reaction - positive or negative - out of anyone who sees it. I love it too, but I also 100% understand why somebody would loathe it. Either way though, it's one of the most interesting new series to come out in years, the work of a genius director playing with prime material, and it's absolutely worth checking out if you can stomach all the sex, blood, and rock n roll.

So yeah, Devilman Crybaby is a wild ride of a show and probably the most exciting thing you'll watch all season. Definitely check it out!

Just...don't watch it in public. Don't be like Akira.