Review of Monster

It's a bit upsetting to see this work of incredible dedication and effort garner attention a hearty, healthy two decades after its initial release. Madhouse has, once more, shown its studio's insane talent in creating stunning frame-by-frame animation and capturing atmosphere in every shot. Not to mention the down-to-single-hairs detail of certain shots and rich sound design of this 74 episode long show... Now where I've lost my shit over the production value: If you're a fan of non-black-and-white character portrayal & psychological horror, this show is probably the late 20th century European Cowboy Bebop-Death Note fusion you've been praying. The goal of the show is reallyas deep as the viewer is willing to let it be ー To some, it might be the agonizing cat-and-mouse of a well-meaning doctor, who chose the wrong patient to operate on that day. As he travels far and wide, looking to undo his 'mistake', learning about the Monster's life story while doing so.
To some, it might be a story about the core psychology of the different foundations that make up the society we live in, fuelled by corruption, fear, solitude, conflicted love, twisted or misinterpreted desire, existentialism, the list goes on. In doing so, it won't hit the viewer with solutions to every problem. What it will do, though, is end things in proper fashion. This includes allowing a character's life to end as soon as their existence comes full-circle.
It's a story about 'why's and 'how's ー "Who is the TRUE monster?"; "Who drove them to be that way?"; "How could this happen?". The answer is 74 times 24 minutes long, leading to yet another viewpoint one could take to this story.
Parents/Caretakers make people.
Every person in the story has an upbringing to refer to. If one looks for it, it might just start to become the most giving part of a character's personality. As soon as their family comes into play, something critical gets revealed that will change the viewer's view on them completely. Having an origin makes one undeniably human, and it's often shown (usually through the morally questionable characters) that, the less loving and the more messy the situation of a child (or person, in general) becomes, the worse they'll come out the other end.
The message is not "Everything can be solved with love", though. It's more along the lines of "Everything can be figured out through understanding."
Love can destroy people, as it tends to deteriorate over time and rot inside your being. Closure can hurt at first impact, but will settle after awhile and let you adapt to a reality amidst it.

The only reason I cannot give the Madhouse adaptation of Naoki Urasawa's Monster a 10/10 is the somewhat off-putting time skips and flashbacks, and ways the story is told to, if I'm not wrong, five overlapping character POVs at once at some point. It clears up a lot of character relations and questions this way, but might become odd to some, who do not remember every reference or unspecified, internal goal of every POV. (And there *is* a lot of nice callbacks that could be overlooked quite easily. Albeit, that might be intentional - Some writers like a bit of torture in their subconscious about these lovely little things.)

That being said, I greatly enjoyed it.
If you trust yourself to have an open and observative mind throughout the run of this mentally challenging show, go on and give it a watch.