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MistLiigh

  • Just to the left of Waldo
  • Joined Jul 5, 2018
  • 31 / M

Devilman: Crybaby

Dec 31, 2018

Devilman: Crybaby is a divisive series, and it's not hard to see why - explicit sexual content, graphic violence, an unusual and often less than pretty art style, and at times haphazard storytelling, just to touch on a few details. In my personal experience watching this show, I found myself with mixed opinions throughout and shifted between a positive and negative overall impression multiple times; even as I type this, I’m still not sure how exactly to rate it. When it was all said and done, however, I found myself overall more positive than negative; in the end, whether you enjoy Crybaby or not is going to be heavily dependent on what you want from it, and your tolerance for controversial content and the problems with its art and writing.

Story

This is likely the most contentious part of Devilman for me. Mostly because story is very important to me, and this show is not very straight-forward to judge on its story. I think I hit upon a significant trend through the series in the discussion thread: the best writing generally happens in the subtle details, characterizations (which don’t really count toward this section), and individual scenes. The big picture is where the writing falters: a lot of events just kind of happen with no real indication of why (some of them are later justified, but I feel it doesn’t negate the frustration in the moment), motivations are often unclear or nonsensical, and there are a number of moments where you can definitely feel how cramped the story is. One moment in particular stands out near the end of the series, which was supposed to be a powerful and emotional scene but honestly felt pretty cheesy, and any success it had was immediately undermined when a random action sequence suddenly breaks out without allowing the proper amount of levity.

So yes, story was probably my biggest problem with this series, but those subtleties were also its greatest strength in my eyes… I’m going with a 7/10 here: even the worst writing here wasn’t offensively bad, it just needed work and space. The details pushed it above mediocre for me, and the suitably epic and climactic finale helped make up for some of the show's narrative shortcomings.

Animation

This is an odd category for this series. As I’ve mentioned already, Devilman: Crybaby has a rather unusual art style; to my knowledge, I believe this is a common occurrence with anime directed by Masaaki Yuasa, but considering the only other one of his works I’ve seen is Kick-Heart, I’m not exactly qualified to speak to his brand. However, within this single series, I found that there were times when the show could look really good, and times when it looked like hot garbage. In particular, there were a number of scenes surrounding the main characters (Akira, Ryo, and Miki mostly) that clearly received more focus, and were made to look quite good, and some of the more action-packed sequences worked quite well. On the other hand, a lot of scenes that didn’t have much going on (a conversation between Silene and Kaim in a car immediately comes to mind) clearly received minimal effort and just looked terribly ugly, and there were some other action sequences that didn’t flow together quite so well.

In the end, I’m giving the animation a slightly below-neutral rating of 4.5/10. For me, the highs in this category just didn’t exceed the lows, but they did help a lot.

Sound

Sound is not something I’m very good at evaluating, and for me, this series didn’t particularly stand out one way or the other, so I’ve opted not to score on this category.

Characters

As with everything about the series, the characters in Crybaby were somewhat up and down… but I'd have to say less so than other categories. Ryo felt a bit like a caricature at times (though by the end that is somewhat understandable), while characters like Akira, Miki, Miko, and Koda get a good bit of development and depth. Even Wamu and his rapping crew had some good moments by the time it was over, and Miki’s family had some interesting and subtle characterizations that told us a lot about them even when they didn’t have much screen time. On the other hand, many of the demons were simply over-the-top, and very few really had any sort of actual character; even the ones that did didn't particularly have any development, and simply served as mouthpieces for a thematic element that honestly could have been tied in and executed better.

I’m going to have to go with another 7/10 for this category. None of the characters blew me away, and some were less than thrilling… but overall, I was happy with what we did get.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m giving this a 7/10 (3.5/5): not incredible, but worth experiencing. In the end, the low animation score means less to me than the story and characters. It’s a truly mixed bag, and absolutely not for everyone. However, I think that if you can handle the hit-or-miss art style and extremely explicit content, then Devilman: Crybaby is certainly worth its 10 episode run, but likely could have been better under different circumstances.

This review was part of the 2018 Secret Santa event.

7/10 story
4.5/10 animation
?/10 sound
7/10 characters
7/10 overall

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