Review of Devilman: Crybaby

Lets talk about the big huge problems with this show first: The Art and animation. While I found nothing offensive about the way this show was drawn it certainly does not have "mass appeal" and I'm sure many people will be constantly taken out of the story because they can't get into the art style. Also the colors chosen for this show are clearly a tie in to the popular anime music video ME!ME!ME! which is also about debauchery and human vice. Here is the problem though, this is a netflix show with the goal to reach more than just the casual anime crowd and eventhe casual anime crowd is taking one look at the art in this show and saying "that's a flaming piece of garbage". So how the hell are non anime fans supposed to be exposed to anime for the first time with such a high barrier to entry? Also holy fuck the running animations are just the worst, literally taking an extra point off the entire score because they are just that bad. I understand demons are superhuman/natural and shouldn't move like regular humans but someone should have taken one look at the running animations and fired the person responsible.

The sound is fantastic though (with the exception of horrible engrish in the sub version. My fucking god hire a native English speaker or at least a competent one for those scenes.) and the hip hop/rap performed by the characters is notably impressive.

The characters themselves are compelling and real and you really get hooked on wanting to find out what is going to happen next. This is easily the best character development I have seen in a show in a long time.

The story itself is very flawed though. It differs wildly at the end from the manga ending and leaves out a massive part of the story as well as a ton of information about the relationship between the 2 main characters. The best I can hazard is they are hoping for a season 2 to reveal all this but the problem is the way they ended season 1 I don't think season 2 will get funding. They basically picked the absolute worst spot to end the series if they wanted to be able to convince people to come back and watch more later.

Overall a very flawed adaption of some really good source material. I give it a 6/10.