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


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intothemystic



Joined: 20 Nov 2005
Posts: 25
Location: USA, charlotte, nc
PostPosted: Wed Jan 24, 2018 8:11 am Reply with quote
I was enjoying Devilman Crybaby. I liked the character designs and the animation was top notch. I've always enjoyed Yuasa ever since his episode in Samurai Champloo.

I loved that Miki was an actual character and not just a caricature as she had been. Miko's story I think deserved more time because I loved her arc. The rappers were another fantastic inclusion because of the nice addition to the theme of humanity's inhumanity.

However, after episode 9 I have nothing but disgust for the show. That entire sequence is just frustrating in how it just ruins what was a good to great show. Yeah, it's what happened in the manga and that's the story, but it's crap.
Miki's brutalizing and mutilation has always been a narrative necessity and has always been treated as a "lady in the fridge" scenario and that was more "acceptable" back when she was just a caricature in the background but not when she's been one of the more fleshed out characters and one of the better parts of the show. There was no narrative need in this story as presented for what happened and that so much of the story having been changed to have done this smacks of it being done just to have it done. The following episode 10 makes it even more infuriating because there's no real catharsis and no perceived affect on Akira.
A character who is described by Devilman as the anchor to his humanity should have more actual impact on the Devilman character and there's no sense that it did. If there is a real romance in this show as presented it's between Akira and Miki and not Ryo and Akira. If that was the relationship you wanted to show then there needed to be more to progress that to the ending we got. As is, I don't care about Ryo in this show. If he's the central and important cog in this tale then he needs to be so. He's just a catalyst for events and at no point to I get any sense of feeling for Ryo. Maybe it's a failure by the voice actor but it doesn't change the fact that I don't care about Ryo and Akira's relationship so that ending just left me with narrative blue balls of anger and frustration.

S/ You know, because Ryo was a real interesting character with that passionless voice acting and his sociopathic tendencies throughout the show. When the extent of the so called important romance was basically Ryo telling Akira to go to this place and do this thing, that's not some hint or groundwork to a great romance that affects Satan. It doesn't even make sense since Ryo never even knew he was Satan apparently.

Meanwhile, the relationship that had been given time and effort was just chucked out the door in the penultimate episode because "manga did it" and treated a character that it had taken time to develop as just a stepping stone to a letdown of a story ending.
The fight was okay, but I hated the pessimism and depressing crap of that 80's and 90's "mature" anime and I still hate that it infected this thing.
What sucks is that the need to keep Miki's death as it had been just makes all the work done to make her an actual character seem pointless and I'll include the rappers in that as well. This show took a trio of fresh and interesting characters of 3 dimensions and just killed them because "that's what it did in the manga".
The need to incorporate the manga ending is just as poor a choice. People talk of Nagai's work needing updating, well you can start by doing away with his nihilistic bullcrap that infected the 80's and 90's OVAs that made anime a stigmatized niche other's looked down on.
I was enjoying Devilman Crybaby until Yuasa decided to make a pastiche to the very worst aspects of such trash OVA's such as Genocyber, Ninja Resurrection, and MD Geist.

That you would recommend this to people and that it's actually gotten some popularity just makes me even more angry. We really going to go back to the hyperviolent, cynical, and depressing anime that kept me away from the genre.

Devilman Crybaby could have been more than what Devilman had been. It could told it's story of the darkness of man without having to resort to the negative tropes that made old hyperviolent anime such a waste. It had done it. Episode 8 and the first half of episode 9 had done that, but then he had to just give in to the absolute worst of anime tropes.
It could have been more and instead it just gave you a tease of what it could have been before reverting to what had been and that's just disappointing and sad.

It's so disappointing that it's going to be a long time before I watch anything by Yuasa actually. I need time to not see his name and be reminded of this horrible throwback to an anime era that belongs in the trashcan of history; the 90's OVA.
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Rai The Noblesse



Joined: 22 Aug 2013
Posts: 77
PostPosted: Wed Jan 24, 2018 10:41 am Reply with quote
imo it was insane crap... only the original main story towards the very end on the remake was partially good .. most of the drama and character build ups didn't work..., and 90% of art was eye cancer, imo
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