Review of Dan Da Dan
It never fails to put a smile on my face to see a faithful adaptation of a manga everyone has recently hyped for the past year. In an era littered with botched adaptations, it's so nice to find an anime that can add more to the source material while staying true to the plot and characters. Spare the introduction, it's purely fast-paced and filled with craziness that would appeal to pretty much anyone willing to try and watch it. You got aliens, yokais, bayonetta granny, gyarus, and a nerd being an absolute chad, all the while managing to not be overwhelming during its entire run. This maysound a bit nitpicking, but hopefully, I'm not the only person who feels this way. Honestly, I thought the character designs were off when each episode premiered. The manga's character design has always looked smooth, detailed, and very expressive. However, in the anime version, it does retain the same expressive mood but doesn't look as detailed as it should in the manga, typically I'm referring to the human characters. It could be because of the different character designs in mind, but I think it would do more justice to make them look a bit more identical than what the final product looked like in the end.
Otherwise, I can confidently say it's one of the best anime we've gotten in this barren fall and probably even one of the best to come out this year. So much justice is done to the voice acting and animation of the anime, perhaps the two most important aspects of Dandadan in general. It took a while to get used to Momo's voice but she was able to match the tone of our first shown character in this wacky anime. Okarun's VA being Natsuki Hanae was just an instant win, the tone, the mannerisms, the delivery, everything that makes Okarun as a character is just replicated with such precision, you'd love to learn more about Okarun right after every episode. A lot of the performances helped make Okarun and Momo stand out a lot more and their scenes just flourish the more you watch it.
Coming from Science SARU, a name I haven't heard in a while just delivered a home run with their incredible production value. Excluding the long animation pauses they do sometimes during long walking scenes, much of the spotlight factored from the animation, creative action sequences, and good use of transitions coupled with great music together, you get absolute cinema from Dandadan itself. Until it all assembled to create a perfect episode while delivering a sob-worthy story to remember Dandadan by.
Even when I say that the voice acting and animation are huge pillars of the anime, so much of its catalog is dedicated to its humor, chemistry, and emotional story-telling, you could even say that the anime is pretty much a quirky romance disguised as a weird action shounen anime. When I say the humor works, it really does. A lot of Dandadan's jokes and setups are well-done thanks to the direction making use of transitions and timings very well, it helps make sense of the setting and context, so you should be expecting a lot of laughs without any weak execution or substandard delivery. Even when the action is going through downtime, it's as if there was no downtime at all, as you're immediately going through a pretty cute romance progression between Momo and Okarun for every scene they have together, the depressing yet seductive voice from Okarun just uttering oscar-worthy rizz while Momo being such a mood have to be one of Dandadan's best highlights if you omit the action Dandadan boasts on. The supporting characters also complement each other even though it does walk into very familiar territory many experienced anime watchers may find to be excessive. The obstacles (regarding the antagonists) were also done well and never felt like a chore to watch since they were able to fit some romance into such a chaotic scenario.
Time to switch the topic and address the elephant in the room:
"This anime sexualizes minors!" - A random article writer.
95% of anime that are popular have teenagers as main characters in their respective stories, and fanservice regarding these characters were already done before Dandadan even existed. Anyone who thinks the anime shouldn't get away with these dirty jokes, might as well should make every other anime remove fanservice, which also happened to be hundreds of others that have already existed before. I could name a couple of reasons why this sentence was used against Dandadan, particularly that the year 2024, happened to be a time of many sexual allegations towards minors were true, and the fact that Dandadan happened to have a plot catalyst surrounding a man who just lost his pee-pee, making everyone go to hell and back, facing supernatural beings just to get it back, and as such, you may find some people willing to oppose and come up with this in mind. Sure, the fanservice was a bit on the nose when in its first few episodes, but even then, it wasn't anything out of the ordinary for most fanservice scenes.
Complaining about something that happens a dozen wouldn't do much in the end, besides having a crush on animated characters is perfectly justifiable and normal when you love a show. If anything, we've seen an abundance of proof that it does more good than harm to make everyone start glazing or swooning at fictional characters, it's just a sign of a good character and helps the show reach a broader audience if people share about some of the incredible characters in Dandadan.
I hope this addressed some of your worries regarding Dandadan, even though it's more of me glazing the anime, I genuinely believe this is a work of art. It's a rare case of an anime going through multiple themes and being able to balance everything through the entire cour of Season 1. Now that the fun is up, we'll have to wait for a while to watch Season 2 of Dandadan. Here's hoping to another amazing season of Dandadan once it comes back.
Thank you for reading.