DEVILMAN CRYBABY

 

 "You're not a demon, you're not a human either. You're a devilman, and so I will save you."

This is a quote from one of my favourite anime, Devilman Crybaby! It’s a series animated by Netflix but the original creator is Go Nagai.

 

PLOT

 

Akira Fudo learns from his old best friend Ryo Asuka that the demons are reviving and they’re trying to reclaim the world from humans. Since the humans are helpless against this threat, Ryo decides to combine Akira with a demon. After that he becomes a Devilman, a being with the power of a demon but with a human heart.”

 

Before you decide to watch it I need to warn you because this series contains some explicit content (like drugs usage, violence, gore, sexual contents in general...) and I recommend it to anyone who isn’t sensitive to these type  of things. Apart from that, you can easily enjoy the show  because it has a cartoonish style and the scenes aren’t that realistic.

 

Every episode becomes darker than the previous one and when you think there is a little bit of hope, things get worse. I personally appreciate this because it’s a good representation of the decline of  humanity; you can clearly see that when there is no hope human beings become more selfish and only want  to save   themselves even at the cost of sacrificing their loved ones. It’s not only a violent show, as perhaps you can guess from the warnings, but there is a lot of psychological in-depth. It shows, as I said, the fall of humanity and how human beings turn selfish when things become dangerous and it analyzes the personality of the protagonists showing that each of them is unique and have their own vision of what is happening in the world.

Now I’d like to shortly talk about the manga this anime is based on,  since it’s quite underrated and hasn’t been read by many. There are differences between the anime and the manga but the plot remained  almost the same. As for the drawings, they have an old and simple art style, since it was originally published in the 1972,  but,  in their simplicity, they manage to transmit all the sensations that those desperate scenes contain.

 

A thing that I really appreciated in the manga is that you can see that Ryo shows his feelings more and it’s more  human  than in the anime, where he’s shown with a very cold personality.

 

To conclude I recommend it to anyone who isn’t afraid of watching apocalyptic, graphic stuff and likes the horror genre.

akira