Review of Devilman: Crybaby

If you just want a short version without spoilers it's right there at the very bottom. I don't remember the last time an anime disappointed me as much as Devilman Crybaby. When it was announced I was excited about one of the best anime directors potentially making a candy out of what is mostly a schlocky action horror manga with a simple anti-war message and some really ballsy plot choices. My friends and a lot of people in general were expressing how the show touched them and I thought this time around the characters will be fleshed out and I'd care about what happens to thembut it all fell apart.

I'll be referencing manga throughout the review. Original material in my opinion serves as a good point of reference because while Crybaby brings over almost entirety of manga's material it also adds and removes things that muddy the elements of original story that made it work.

One thing that will become noticeable right off the bat is this isn't going to be a straightforward adaptation, instead of prologue explaining that demons used to inhabit the world and how their fusion mechanic works we get a few shots of flying through space and Ryo saying how since love doesn't exist then neither does sadness, or so he thought. My problem with this is that manga's opening is a strong introduction to the world of Devilman, it captures you with the unusual premise while simultaneously providing information that's relevant throughout the story. Anime instead tries to lure you in with mystery of why Earth just got bombed, it could've easily been coupled with the aforementioned info but instead it's fed to the viewer at the very end when it doesn't really expand their knowledge and won't be relevant any further because the show is about to end.

Manga shares with us the perspective and mindset of demons right away, understanding it makes the conflict a lot more interesting because instead of it just being good guys against of bad guys it makes you think whether or not demons have a point.It's better than the anime framing it as evil doing evil things which makes people turn evil and good guys have to serve as the last outpost of hope.

Second problem is the addition of Ryo and Akira being friends since childhood and it's a problem with many layers to it.
One is that it's clearly there only to try and make the viewer invested into the their relationship, make the betrayal at the end feel more dramatic, establish Akira as a deeply empathetic character and set up Ryo as a... psychopath? It sounds good on paper but in reality it's one of the things that adds to why Crybaby comes off as manipulative instead of genuine, you know nothing about these characters and you won't by the end of the show. Their relationship is not fleshed out and it starts off at a point that immediately makes Ryo unlikable so what weight does the betrayal have?

Two is that it made more sense in the original that Satan only planted himself in the human world for a few years to get grasp of human culture and set his plans into action. It makes more sense than being sent down to Peru where some villagers worshiped him as some idol while some special operatives kept trying to come and kill him with guns and explosives for god knows how long.

Another reason why I think this is that Crybaby is a clear shift from original in terms of mood while also repeating all the elements that set the mood of the original, resulting in a pretty idiotic clash. Original Devilman story was bold partly because it didn't have humans be the good guys, the story is told from the perspective of a devilman, someone who's no longer human and not entirely a demon, he doesn't have place on either side yet Akira agrees to abandon his own humanity as it is the only way to save it. In the anime he just kinda does it cause Ryo tricks him into a sex demon drug party but the result is the same, if anything anime Akira is even more passionate about saving the human race because he's such a deeply empathetic character. Either way, as I mentioned, devilman is in a way a third party separate from humans and demons.As the story went on Akira got more and more aggravated at the actions of humans who through their own pride, greed and conceit helped manufacture circumstances brought about their own undoing. Near the end, before he snaps, he is already close to the edge which was expressed in a scene where he's faced with the scientists who killed people precious to him precisely because they were close to him and as such, to demons. The scientists plead for their life and tell him that they never harmed any of his kind, they only killed other humans. That's when Akira tells them that even though he's got a demon's body, his heart is still human and these scientists while human in appearance, are just as bad as the demons. In the anime Akira tolerate everything... including his best friend creating the circumstances for people to murder each other based on false information. But who actually cares, right? Because anime completely throws out the explanation of what is required for demons to possess humans and what happens when requirements aren't met yet it still uses the original mechanic of strong human heart being able to control demonic nature.

Original Devilman is a lot more bleak and hopeless, it hammered its themes home by not sugar-coating them or favoring one side over the other which a lot of fiction concerning the atrocities of war forgets to do, thereby obscuring the whole point it tries to make. Yuasa doesn't have many works under his belt that would carry the similar mood, I've only seen Mind Games, Tatami Galaxy, Kaiba and Ping-Pong and in all of them, despite difficult times the characters have to go through there's usually an overall positive mood and a promise of better tomorrow, it's partly why his other works are actually incredibly touching and personal. I feel like he attempted to do the same thing here but you can't just do the original story and add few sentimental moments and expect it to work.

As anime continues, more people might have a problem with how much sex there is, there's a relatively long scene of people using drugs and just boobs and butts and vaginas which culminates in a lot of stylish over the top violence. I personally found Sabbath scene to be incredibly impressive in accurately capturing the purpose of the whole gathering with no limits. In the original manga, before Ryo and Akira enter a hippy rave with drugs and alcohol Ryo explains that in order for a demon to possess a human he needs to abandon all sense and become a mindless animal. That's why they start off by doing drugs and Ryo then goes into a violent frenzy that gets them both beat up. In anime I guess his violence is just straight up senseless. Either way, the way it was done in anime is almost perfect and I still enjoy it but it also sets a trend for a lot of horny shit happening later on at pretty much random for no reason. Anime version of Serene seems to only think about having sex with Amon and masturbating, why was that there I do not know. Akira also has two scenes where he has wet dreams which make him turn into devilman, which one time leads to his ceiling being comically splashed in cum. You might have guessed it, it's another problem I will eventually mention when talking about tone. Aside from this there's also an original character whose job is to make erotic photos of teenagers, one of them is Miko who is nothing like her manga counterpart and is a different character altogether, anyway, she and Miki are implied to have done some photo shoots with the perv and while Miki probably haven't done anything out of the ordinary, Miko is shown masturbating while getting photographed, later on memories of it and Akira's huge dong make her so horny she starts masturbating again while making donkey noises.

I think you get the point, there is A LOT of sex in this and the best reason I can come up with it to justify it is that Yuasa for some reason wanted to show how demons are really horny like it's a thing they basically have to do, cause Akira spends a lot of the time prior to Sirene fight just being incredibly horny, after the fight though it slowly but surely phases out of the story. If this is why he decided to add it then it's still bad cause he never elaborates on it and there's no logical arc to it or anything in general so it's just senseless schlock sex. I just think it's one of those cases where they add it to be cool and edgy like a lot of old OVAs tried to do. It also contributes to difficulty of taking the show seriously when you have a somewhat serious scene of characters talking but one of them has ridiculously huge tits just hanging out there like it's nothing. I'm no prude, I like boobs as much as everyone but this is just obnoxious.

Chronologically next issue I had with the anime is tone, it's all over the place. In one moment it's comedic, next shot it's tragic, next shot it's badass over the top violence. Tone is extremely important when it comes to guiding the viewer, getting your message across and making sure the scene makes people feel they way you want them to feel. Using the frame composition, music, sound effects, visual effects, dialogue etc. the director can make you either laugh or be afraid of the same scene and when all of this is randomly mixed together the viewer won't know how they're supposed to feel or what was the scene supposed to convey. The sequence that felt the worst in this aspect to me was the colosseum event where one of the runners is forced to turn into a monster and starts murdering people. When he does so a cool synth soundtrack kicks in and you see a cool monster rampage around killing everybody but then to the tune of same synths you watch a crowd of people desperately try to get out, all crying and moaning and begging for someone to save them, it's supposed to be tragic, I guess? There's nothing badass about that scene but it's set to the cheesy synthwave music, so it seems rather inappropriate and it does switch to a more dramatic orchestral track later on for no reason but it's also interrupted by some dude just sitting there on the field and listening to [RELAXING MUSIC] until he gets suddenly stomped with perfect comedic timing. Was that supposed to be funny? I don't know but it certainly seemed funny to me because of how absurd it was, why was that cut even there? Anyway, later on we switch to Akira turning into a badass Devilman and watch him carry away the huge bull demon cause it's actually just another confused devilman who murdered a bunch of people cause he doesn't understand how to control his demon body. There are other silly scenes towards the end where a plane cutout goes woosh over the scene to crash into a low-res gradient sphere and people kill themselves by jumping from high building with a very nice, crunchy and comedic sploosh and a mad preacher who shouts bible verses and then whips out two uzis and starts shooting everywhere. At that point it's clear that Yuasa wants you to see how crazy and paranoid people have gotten but it comes across batshit stupid and hamfisted.

I didn't exactly have much positive to say about characters so far, that's because there are no good characters in Crybaby. Not every show [needs] developed characters, something like One Piece can get away just by giving them a few quirks and attributes to make their interactions entertaining, it doesn't take away from the adventure that none of them have much depth to them. However Crybaby wants you to be invested in the characters and care about what happens to them, it wants you to be sad and cry when they die and you don't achieve that by doing nothing. If someone shows you a drawing of anime girl dying you might feel bad depending on the way it's depicted but I doubt you will be devastated or shocked cause it's just a random drawing with nothing else to it. That's how I felt watching Crybaby cause the show didn't give me a reason to care. The rap thugs are pretty charming and charismatic but that's mostly cause they came in with some sick ass freestyle now and then and I enjoyed seeing them on the screen, it was a bit of a shame to see them go but that's about it. They don't have personality and their traits are that they're poor and they rhyme. Miki's parents appear now and then with no real input on the story and you know basically nothing about them either, when the family members died one after another I once again didn't feel anything but it's worth mentioning that it also gave us a great piece of character acting when Miki's father discovers his son turned into a demon and is devouring his wife. You can see him slowly die on the inside and agonize as his life being torn apart by this tragic turn of events even though as a character they are nothing the way the father acts makes you feel sympathy because it's human, while the situation is completely fantastical you can still imagine how terrible facing it would be. It's something that was lacking in episode 4 when similar problem happened to Akira's parents. I complained a lot about original manga introducing a little girl character just to kill her few pages later while asking you to care about it and was disappointed when anime did the same damn thing. You know that Akira's parents are doctors and that they are nice, now please care about one of them turning into a demon and killing their spouse and Akira having to end their existence. It's terrible as it is and it's not helped by the absolutely terrible acting on the part of Akira's mom and other people trapped inside demon's body. The demon itself is Jinmen and his thing is that he's a turtle who kills people and after consuming them, their consciousness remains and their face appears on the demon's back. Now Akira's mom, who was just recently devoured by her loved one after he turned into a demon and violently murdered a bus full of people, is faced with her son, who is also kind of a demon but best she can mange is looking and sounding somewhat inconvenienced. I know the whole thing is entirely fictional but I don't believe that all these people would just be kind of sad and complain how much of a bummer it is that they've been murdered instead of screaming in terror and agony while crying their eyes out.
The scene with Miki's father is so well done you feel for him without even knowing much about him because of how human it was. The scene with Jinmen on the other hand is so stilted that it doesn't even come close to being as emotionally impactful.

It also leads into my point about the show being manipulative because despite spending no time or effort on fleshing out the characters, developing them into something and familiarizing the viewer with them so that the death and other tragedies carry more impact, Yuasa resorts to showing you flashbacks set to sad piano music. Music in itself is not bad but the way it's used it extremely important. The way it's used in Crybaby is more akin to a laugh track in an unfunny sitcom, there's no content there to make me sad but the sad music is playing so that's how I'm supposed to feel. It beats the viewer over the head with emotionally charged the music to hide the lack of aforementioned effort in the writing department that's supposed to make you care. It succeeded in making some people sad but the lack of subtlety is rather clear nonetheless.
As for flashbacks, the worst thing about them is that they usually come right before some tragedy is about to occur so it comes off as a very sloppy way give you a reason to once again feel an emotion before the emotional scene happens. There's no build up, no tension, just a flashback to juxtapose happy past with current tragedy. Akira's memory of his parents can be seen as touching due to the innocence of a childhood memory at least but I can't say that for other flashbacks, like the one where you just see Miki running on the track, an activity that has a neutral tone throughout. There were no scenes in show for you to form a bond with the characters so this is what the viewer sees in the compilation of good old times.

I heard a lot of people, even those who liked Crybaby, say that it butchered Ryo's character. That's because Crybaby's Ryo is straight up a crazy sociopath who carries guns on him, murders people, tries to murder animals, tricks Akira into accomplishing his plans and is ultimately at fault for mass hysteria that brings the human downfall. Originally I thought "oh, maybe Yuasa wants Ryo to be more of a character than he was in the manga, where he pretty much disappears at some point until becoming relevant again right before the end, I could see Ryo being aware of his real role from the start being interesting" but that's not the case at all. You see, in the manga Ryo is not a good guy either but most of his actions are driven by trying to help humans, the end justifies the means. He asked Akira to become a devilman to help save humanity, he stabbed hippies because that was the only way to fulfill the requirements for the possession and he tried to keep Akira from fighting because he was afraid for his life if he went out during the initial wave of conflict, which was later proven to be a reasonable concern. You also see his more human side when he's traumatized by the death of his father and when he's scared for his life when demons start fusing with humans even knowing that it will kill both of them when the requirements are not met, he's afraid that, unlike Akira, he can just randomly die a pathetic death. He only starts doing things that help the demons when he learns of his true identity. In the anime I thought for the longest time that they will reveal Ryo was consciously helping the demons all along and his human body is just a disguise but then we get a scene similar to the manga where Ryo finds out that the man who studied demons is not real and when he's in Peru he finds a wooden idol of himself as a baby Satan, yeah I know, sound great. Then we get a Pyscho Jennie reveal again and that's that, Ryo is Satan and he goes on TV to show the tape of Akira turning into a demon. That's pretty much inline with the manga but it doesn't make sense for Ryo to be evil up to that point. The one who claimed that anyone could become a demon in the original manga was a random scientist, he did it because he wanted to reveal his research, it's not much better in terms of writing writing but it makes more sense. It makes none that Akira, who snapped after people turned on each other would tolerate Ryo causing precisely that while also cheering him on to dissuade people from acting paranoid over false info that Ryo himself spread around. You can't even claim that he isn't technically lying cause we weren't told the fusion mechanics cause he clearly understands them when they come a sabbath. The whole invasion of demons and the way they fuse made so much more sense than what Crybaby tries to pass off as reasonable.

Another situational complaint I had is tied to the Serene fight and how terribly executed it was. The whole thing takes place in some black void, Devilman gets battered by a flying white smudge later revealed to be the claw of Serene she can remote control, then Devilman tricks her by stepping out of the way at the last moment and then rips off half of her dome which prompts Kaim to offer her a fusion so they do just that and make a big inside Devilman and die. It looks extremely dull visually and there's no creativity to choreography whatsoever, it's just a copy of the fight in the manga but worse. It also fails to forge emotional connection between the viewer than Serene/Kaim because all they did prior to that is either masturbate in case of Serene or be a generic evil guy in case of Kaim. I was appalled that Yuasa gave all these characters extra screen presence but ended up doing jack shit with it.

When it comes to art I have zero complaints. Backgrounds fit nicely, the framing is interesting and you always have something to look at. Character and monster designs are appealing and creative. Color palette is for the most part extremely pleasant and overall package is overall quite memorable visually. I heard people criticize the show for looking flat which might be the result of one tone shading but those people fail to consider that for most of the show the color contrast between the characters and the background is what keeps it from looking flat, not shading. The decision to go with flat characters is nothing new for Yuasa and while in terms of color Crybaby is not as outlandish as Tatami Galaxy or Kaiba, it's still important to pay attention to his use of color direction.

Short version: Crybaby is a show with an extremely good visuals but the characters are bland, the show tries to be emotionally manipulative without being well written and major parts of the story don't make a lick of sense. Tone is all over the place and the closer it gets to the end the more rushed the pacing feels. It also has a lot senseless sex and nudity that doesn't add anything to the story.