Devilman Crybaby review – Devil Mayn’t Cry

Directed: Masaaki Yuasa

Produced: Science Saru

Licensed: Netflix

Released: January 5^th, 2018

I put a lot of thought into my original outline for this review. Devilman Crybaby kept my thoughts racing from beginning to end. It was a visually and conceptually rich anime, containing vibrant stimuli and the potential for hefty philosophical exploration. This show stirred my imagination for days, as I assembled the themes into a complex yet surprisingly coherent picture. I was convinced that this show contained a remarkable acuity and offered worthwhile insight into why humans carry out so many hideous behaviors. So why was I having such a hard time completing the review?

Devilman Crybaby begins with Akira Fudo, a mild young boy who cries far more often than children his age tend to. He lives with a friend from school, Miki Makimura, while his parents travel the world as doctors healing people abroad. One day, a friend of his from childhood named Ryo Asuka snatches him and brings him to a seedy underground rave called a Sabbath Party. There he tells Akira that demons lay dormant inside humans, and the two of them need to begin eliminating them. After an impromptu rampage, demons attack the club, whereupon a particularly powerful demon named Amon possess Akira.

Akira, however, is strong enough to mentally overpower his new host, taking the powers of Amon’s demonic body while preserving his human heart (soul). Upon assimilating with this demon, Akira’s body goes through changes. He becomes taller, stronger, more athletic, and more attractive, but he also becomes more violent while taking on an intense sexual drive. From there, Akira and Ryo team up to assess and destroy the demon threat, soon realizing that the monsters have infiltrated Japanese society more deeply than previously expected.

This anime had several ideas to share. It demonstrated how the troubling onset of adolescence can intersect with underdeveloped self-control to inspire decadent and violent behaviors. A poor grasp on our aggressive and sexual urges, both overindulgence in and complete suppression of them, helps facilitate self-interested and exploitative systems run by emotionally stunted people. The show even demonstrated how we fear by these baser urges in ourselves, and we project them onto strangers. In a variation on the Deceiver’s Distrust phenomenon, we hate strangers because we believe they possess the same urges as us and are likewise barely in control.

Wrapping my mind around strong themes is usually enough to keep me entertained, often in spite of any real flaws. Regrettably, the frequent musings on hedonism, conscientiousness, interpersonal strife, and social unrest did not translate into motivation for me to write about them. After trying my hardest to wring a decent review out of Devilman Crybaby, I soon concluded that my apathy had to do with the story’s ending; a rushed, slapdash resolution that bailed out on the serious thematic discussions in the first nine episodes.

Considering the spoiler-heavy nature of my central grievance, I want to speak about some of the general qualities, so readers can make a judgment call for themselves without having the story ruined for them. Fans of obscure, avant-garde animation styles will love the way Science Saru created fluid, unreal bodies for humans, demons, and devilmen. Keeping the models loose and malleable added an enthralling tinge of surrealism to the bucket-loads of sexual content, gory violence, and other such libertine delights.

Seriously, this is a lurid piece of anime, assaulting the senses with full-frontal nudity, animalistic lust, subhuman depravity, physical conflict, and showers of red and yellow blood. The demons themselves are the culmination of the nightmarish animation style, possessed of twisting corporeal forms in the vein of Parasyte or Akira. This sadly does not last for the entire series. I am not sure when the money ran out, but too many nighttime scenes ran like sheets of black construction paper across my screen, becoming entirely unwatchable at the slightest screen glare.

The comparison to Akira became more apt as I considered the 1980s nostalgia wave Devilman Crybaby rode in on. As the demon threat becomes more widespread, the world falls into chaos, much like that seen in Akira. The similar emphasis on body horror also felt like it was meant to inspire the culturally relevant anxieties Akira aimed for (dangerous mutations caused by atom bombs and radiation, with government agencies trying to keep these things secret). The music was similarly reminiscent. Something about high-tech synths just evokes a decaying nation on the precipice of collapse.

Yet for how much Devilman Crybaby attempts to portray id-driven indulgences as a major contributor to the degradation of humanity, the show cannot also help reveling in the filth with the rest of the debased humans. Though the narrative looked down upon sex and violence, the animation’s framing went the extra mile to make the ample viscera look fun. The same goes for the lust on display. While much of anime frames sex through the lens of socially awkward boys falling down on the massive breasts of their nurturing sex-mothers, Devilman Crybaby feels like a rough cocaine orgy.

Ryo chides bacchanalian attendees of the Sabbath party as “scum,” yet the camera has to pan slowly over every jiggling breast and twerking butt. Akira reaches a low point when he unwittingly seeks out sex with Silene, the demon woman, yet the animators gladly share the sights and sounds of her loudly masturbating in the previous shot. Sexual predators in and around modeling agencies take advantage of high school girls, yet the camera forces audiences to participate in the predation, freezing the shots over the exposed bodies of (I repeat) high school girls!

This thematic inconsistency becomes a particularly serious problem when the show begins to speak about female sexuality. While Devilman Crybaby has a surprisingly prudish perspective on all sex, it reserves special contempt for women. Silene derives her powers and instability through furious masturbation, marrying her orgasms to sadism and evil. Miko Kuroda, peer of Akira and frenemy to Miki, is a Devilman like Akira, but her sexual urges come paired with indiscriminant violence, vindictiveness and jealousy. As you might expect of a female character in a sophomoric anime, her pettier emotions get in the way of the same logic, utility, and likability Akira has.

This is in stark contrast to Miki, who is comparatively nonsexual and always portrayed as a naïve victim whenever she chooses to express any sexuality. This “innocence” she possesses serves at the moral guide for the story; the apex of maturity involves taking command over humanity’s bodily impulses. We should all seek to develop a composed optimism, buoyed by a basic sense of self-preservation that we usually just end up ignoring. That is, until Devilman Crybaby decides that her worldview is wrong too, officially cementing the futility of any female behaviors.

That futility then devolves into full-on desolation, as any possible thematic or character arc crushes beneath the weight of Devilman Crybaby’s abysmal ending. All thoughtful discussion sunk into a black hole of apocalypticist flailing. What did Akira accomplish by crying? Nothing. What did humanity learn about itself from facing their demons? Nothing. For how poorly the show depicted her, did Miko gain anything by learning to control her sex drive? No. Was Miki able to inspire change through her compassion, something the show insisted was both possible and necessary? No.

Everyone loses, humanity is gone, and any redeeming value portended by Devilman Crybaby blasts into oblivion during the biggest cop out of a conclusion. That may be what bothered me most about Devilman Crybaby. Judgment defines the story, but it has no wisdom to offer in return. Sex, aggression, and meddlesome teenage emotions are ruinous, but any attempt to change them is useless, because our sins are too entrenched and nothing we do would be of consequence. It feels like the writers could only offer trite observation, so they wrote themselves a “get-out-of-intellectual-follow-through” clause. From there, they could just blow everything up before anyone began to suspect that it was all meaningless.

I include the admittedly powerful finale in my blaze of derision. I do not care if the personification of toxic masculinity (suppressed emotions, antipathy for life, and an obsession with “hard choices” and “shocking the people”) finally learned how to express his feelings. Too many people suffered, too many lives were lost, and too many opportunities for genuine inspiration were sacrificed so Satan could feel feelings. That felt like a slap in the face; art literally had to hold itself back so a sociopath could cry for a few seconds. The script needs to work a lot harder to make me sympathize with an unfeeling, violent simpleton who cannot think beyond his impulses and detachment.

This is not the 80s. Iconic visuals, evocative scenes and ambitious ideas can no longer prop up incoherent storytelling and thematic non-commitment. Landmarks like Ghost in the Shell and Akira offered concepts and aesthetics like nothing before. Devilman Crybaby has its own style, but impressive components cannot salvage the immaturity baked into the premise. Prophesizing the end times and casting hypocritical dispersion on sexual pleasure, without adding something to the conversation, just does not cut it with me.

Devilman Crybaby was briefly a good anime, brought down by a saddening ending. It reminded me of how many people think that bitter fatalism counts as sage wisdom; that intelligent people make themselves known by stroking their self-impressed disappointment. Smart people may have a hard time staying happy in a sick, flailing world, but I will not waste my time listening to them add more bile to the rotten mound. One might enjoy Devilman Crybaby’s lurid trashiness on a superficial level. They just have to ignore how much the show hates them for indulging the sex and violence.

Overall, this review became much easier to write when I was honest about how little I enjoyed Devilman Crybaby. This contemptuous creation almost convinced me it was a better anime, stopping just short of significance. While the aesthetics shine brightest (cool animation style, trippy visuals, brilliant soundtrack, and awesome raps), audiences are stuck with a product that cannot cash the check on its own intention. Gorge yourself on a hedonistic joyride, and accept that Devilman Crybaby is only half as good as it thinks it is. I embarrassed myself by insisting there was something deeper, and I am warning you not to do the same.