Review of Devilman: Crybaby

The fever dream of the edgiest mediocrely-gifted teen. It tries to comment on goodness, empathy and self-image and how those can be powerful foundations of humanity rather than weak emotions, but everything in this show is extremely, like... unbelievably surface-level and on top of that it attempts to use bland imagery of gore, drugs and sex as replacement for depth in an extremely cringy-feeling way. Barely any story or character progression to speak of, or at least one is completely detached from even the most extreme stuff later on, due to huge pacing and tonal issues, constant meaningless subversion of stability; it tries to developa big emotional motive in the very last one and a half episodes, but that's just not how storywriting works. Everything is completely forseeable too: Ask yourself what the edgiest most generic thing that could happen would be; it's gonna be pretty much that exactly.

I really don't mind utilizing sex and violence in stories, I actually welcome maturity and confidence. And I am completely fine with stories with younger perspectives, engaging with "juvenile" emotions, Attack on Titan is a famous example of this: youth taking matters into their own hands in the face of hopelessness and incompetence of existing systems. Also 'Game of Thrones' and 'Westworld' are other obvious shows, in which its not just edginess and childishness, they just have good stories that draw from things that actually help tell it. People largely welome it.

'Devilman: Crybaby''s music is decent, visuals are sometimes annoying, sometimes kinda cool, overall I had a pretty bad time forcing myself to get through it. I think it should only be recommended to only those that want a "pseudo-extreme" experience that doesn't make you think. It's not stupid-fun like a 'John Wick', its more like... an even worse, more stylized version of 'Tokyo Ghoul' that takes the occasional horrible character writing from that as an ideal.

How could it have been better? Cut it down to around 1 hour with 4 parts, cut most of the first half of the show. Improve the dialogue, have it be less arrogant, fewer meaningless scenes. Then it would be a C+ level short movie, maybe and would make you somewhat look forward to the creators next project. But like this I'm giving it a D+ (bad, but with upsides, it certainly does have C- even C level moments). I don't have any ill-will towards those that enjoy the show, I just think they deserved much better, and... to be honest maybe I do have a little bit of ill-will towards those that recommended me this.