First Glance: Devilman Crybaby

There comes a point when an anime is so gratuitously extra, so ludicrously edgy, that it becomes completely unclear if there is any deeper theme, meaning, or even narrative progression beneath the bloody piles of mangled sex demon corpses.

Devilman Crybaby reaches that point rapidly, and it never looks back.

None of the characters have apparent motivation, except for the rappers, side characters with a screen time of about one minute whose motivation was so apparent that their sole purpose in the episode was to make the audience wonder whether or not the main female character was going to be raped. None of the events that occur follow each other. The worldbuilding, if you can call it that, is thin and tired. The visuals feel lazy; the character designs and animation are all ho hum. The show tries to distract you with arbitrary use of color, but it's a meager sham.

There's just nothing there. (I know I said that about Inferno Cop, but that was two minutes long; Devilman Crybaby packs arguably less value into twenty-four.) If you want to watch demons fucking and killing each other, there're higher quality, more concise outlets—notably, the DyE Fantasy music video.

Recommend: No.