Review of Devilman: Crybaby

Netflix never ceases to surprise me, every time for a bad reason. This is the first time I ever felt like giving the lowest possible score. Most bad animes have some kind of saving grace. They may be bad, but they usually get at least one or two aspects right. That is not the case here, at all. TL;DR: This is not just bad, it's disgustingly bad. The first episode will tell you it all: It's all about drugs, sex and gore. Just that, for the entire 10 episodes. It is just shock value. The message of the story is that even in this world wheredemons who literally slaughter humans exist, HUMANS are the real evil. It provides no more substance than that. Every character is one-dimensional with no real nuance whatsoever. There are A LOT of better options with similar themes, but are WAY BETTER than this. Recommendations in the bottom.

Having never watched Devilman, other than the "When my Devil Rises" PV by Man with a Mission (which is awesome), no comparison will be made with the original series.

The series feels like it was written by an edgy 14 yo who thinks drugs, sex and humans being eviscerated in gruesome ways is enough to make a good adult story. It's all of that for no other reason than they wanted it to be for pure shock value. And it gets old REALLY fast. I can just end the review here since that's all you'll get from this show, but there are a couple points worth of note.

Leaving the content aside for a minute, the drawing and animation are pure garbage. Everything is disproportionate, and sure someone will try to say this is an "artistic choice". No it's not. Real artists don't draw things out of proportion just because they fell like it. The most charitable way to think about this is that they didn't have time or money to do anything better and went with it anyway. It feels like Netflix is testing what is the limit for people to still watch while they pay studios to make budget animations while they reap the profits. The evidence of that is the newer Gokufushudou adaptation they made, which is quite literally an slideshow of the manga. Even some fan-made adaptations are better than that. Because of that, the fights and sex scenes are laughably bad. And on that note, why would you show a literal kid consuming porn? Even the only kid they depicted in the entire show is depraved.

All characters, perhaps except Akira are consistently bland. The unnamed characters are evil for evil's sake, either because they are religious fanatics or because they just like killing innocent people using the pretense that they may be demons in disguise. It's fine to point human evil, but when almost ALL humans are evil, it just feels cheap.

Most of the demons are just gruesome beasts, similar to bloodthirsty animals and that's how they're somehow better than humans, as they have no moral, killing only on instinct, while humans choose to be evil.

Being a Netflix show aimed at western audiences, of course they needed to depict gay sex, and of course, the gay guy is a good guy. And of course they would use part of the Bible to paint their view of Christianity. To be fair, there are quite a few who do the same and just preach the parts they like of the Bible, but it's worth pointing this out. Perhaps this changes nothing for some, but it makes every western media from the past 10 years or so feel the same. It's like need to have a political agenda, they need to have "representation", if there are Christians depicted, they need to be ridiculous. It's a cartoonish depiction of the world.

This is a minor note, but worth to be pointed out: There are some aspects in the show that are loosely (to say the least) based on Christianity. There is Satan and his goal is to bring a secular version of the Apocalypse. Satan here is somehow an angelic form of Lucifer, which is by definition asexual, fused with the classic depiction of Baphomet, which has breasts and a penis (thus both sexes, as most demons usually are depicted). While usually Satan is either Baphomet (most of the times) or Lucifer, they combined them to make this new form.

In conclusion, there's close to no reason to watch this, except if you really want to see depictions of drug use, sex and gore, but even then there are a plethora of better options. From classics like Elfen Lied, in which gore is used to depict the duality between innocence and violence; dozens of action animes, like Hellsing (and Hellsing Ultimate), Kiseijuu, Drifters [...] all of which have actually good fighting scenes and at the very least interesting plots; And of course it would be a sin to not mention Berserk, the masterpiece from Kentaro Miura which is gorgeously drawn, has amazing story telling and actually has a meaningful nuance between the duality of good and evil, between humanity and demons; Words are not enough to explain how good Berserk is, you need to read it. But there's also another recommendation that isn't really anime, but a game, in fact my favorite of all time, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor, which is originally for NDS, but was ported to 3DS as Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor Overclocked, with a story expansion and (most importantly) fully voiced dialogues. Most people know Persona, which is aimed at teens, Shin Megami Tensei is the classic experience, and the Devil Survivor is a spinoff of that series. The plot is amazing, being a story-heavy VN based on the Bible with multiple endings, which shows how you can make an ACTUALLY interesting fantasy interpretation of the Bible; The OST is freaking awesome, with most being rock and really fits atmosphere; And the RPG part is very well done, with an awesome strategic combat system and perhaps the best summon/fuse system of all SMT games which allows you to create very customizable demons fairly easy. It's a gem that more people should play. Guess I wrote much more than intended. Thanks for reading :*