DAN DA DAN Season 2

Episode 18

Hell — and I cannot possibly stress this enough — yes.

Like I've been saying for a long time now, DAN DA DAN's greatest strength isn't just its ability to confidently and smoothly switch genres on the fly. What makes this anime such an unstoppable force is that it is so consistently capable of showing up all of its competitors and contemporaries, no matter which genre it decides to embody in any given scene. It's got the funniest comedy sketches, the most heartwarming romance scenes, some of the best badass spectacle of any shonen anime, and its slice-of-life shenanigans are the sliciest and the liveliest. Now, with “We Became a Family”, DAN DA DAN casually saunters into a brand new playing field and carves “Metal as Hell, Baby” into whatever free space is left on the shiny buckle of its championship belt.

Look, the score for this episode was basically in the bag before we even hit the halfway mark. It was funny enough when the exorcist hayashi band that Seiko hired to help Jiji turned out to be a squad of visual-kei dorks not so subtly referencing X Japan. When the band started blasting their tunes to bring the house down, it was all over. If an episode goes the extra mile to hire the lead singer of freaking Dragonforce and the former lead guitarist of Megadeth to perform the fully localized English cover of your original power ballad, then it automatically gets five stars. That is codified in the Big Book of Anime Critic Law. I don't make the rules, I just enforce them with fanatical zeal.

You can't even get mad that the showstopping set piece is technically a giant waste of time, since no human with an ounce of empathy would blame Seiko and the gang for listening to Jiji's desperate pleas to spare Evil Eye. Like Granny Ayase says, the kid's got heart, dammit, and you understand why he would be willing to live his abominable Ranma-esque existence as a demonic vessel to keep his promise to the angry and isolated kid that still lives somewhere down in the Evil Eye's core. Aira, of course, is adamantly against the “Listen to Jiji” plan, but we all know that she is a delusional psychopath who cannot be reasoned with. That's what makes her Best Girl*.

(*It is here where I must make it clear that Aira being Best Girl does in no way imply that she is superior to Momo, because Momo transcends petty anime heroine rankings and rules from a throne far above the realm of mere mortals.)

I am beginning to worry that week after week of me ranting about DAN DA DAN being “a generational masterpiece” and “functionally perfect in basically every way” is going to come across as mindless fanboy hype to anyone that reads this without the context of the show. To watch DAN DA DAN, though, is to witness an anime systematically accomplish every single goal it sets its sights on with effortless flair. It has taken every element of an already top-tier manga and translated it to the medium of animation with such aplomb that it has only ever improved on the source material. Even a sequence as seemingly inconsequential as Aira's morning makeup routine becomes a genuinely thrilling little cinematic exercise in visual storytelling that most anime won't - or can't - execute even on their best of days.

What else can I say? I'm sure that DAN DA DAN will someday have to drop an episode that is merely okay, at least compared to everything else that the show has delivered. I'll be sure to let you know if that ever happens, and we can all rest easy knowing that, even then, the show is still probably going to kick supreme amounts of ass.

Rating:

DAN DA DAN Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Netflix.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.