Review of Dan Da Dan
I'm a bit of a generational hater when it comes to anime, but honestly I'm digging this. Oddly I didn't particularly care for the manga, and dropped it around the point S1 ends. I think the anime works for me because they visually aged the characters up a couple years, so they at least they LOOK older than the manga which was weirding me out. Which you know, when I was 18 I wouldn't have batted an eye at that sort of thing, but in my 30s it turns into a bit of a red flag (especially when you know the people making the mangaare even older than I am, awkward). My last complaint before I praise it is that it has a bit too much "cutesy" filler, but hey we can all do with some cute shit in our lives now and again eh? Otherwise I really love everything about the show. Absolutely banging music and top tier sound design, seriously the audio nerds cooked with this one. Love the animation, it's modern without being offense to a generational "omg modern anime is so ugly" hater like myself, they did an incredible job with lighting and shading to make it look like traditional 2D animation without any of those uncanny valley flat weirdly lit "cgi" bits, not too many cheesy "action" shots, and the background art is really great - it's not as good as 90s watercolor background art but it's still really good. Characters are a little cookie cutter personality wise, buuuut it's anime so what do you expect, that being said the aesthetic design of the characters is pretty great which makes up for it imo. Story wise I wouldn't really say this is anything new as it does play on existing anime themes/tropes. but without being offensive and it feels like its own original thing which is nice. Comparing it to other anime, it reminds me of Kill la Kill, Mob Psycho, FLCL, and Tenchi Muyo.
Hopefully subsequent seasons keep up the high quality art and animation, currently watching S2 and thankfully it's still incredible.
TL;DR If you're not into perverted high octane crazy zany balls to the wall color blasting anime you need not apply with this one. Now give me your banana organ and begone.