Review: DEVILMAN crybaby
🌕🌕🌕🌑🌑
A visual and musical feast that’s not meant for timid viewers
This 10-part series on Netflix has a lot going for it in terms of visual storytelling. The unmitigated imagination demonstrated by Masaaki Yuasa’s continually ways of cutting from one scene to the next. I never could predict what was coming next in terms of use of color, music, different ways of setting up a scene, or even types of scenes. It made the world seem so much bigger than would otherwise be the case given the smaller number of main characters. The soundtrack was fresh and fit the material. The gore for me wasn’t over the top as the cartoon nature of it mitigated what certainly would have been much more of blood bath were it live action. It emphasized the organic nature of humans or devils, with the latter having a far wider repertoire of shapes and sizes though their behaviors and desires were fairly narrowly defined. So many devils seemed so similar, but were they? I might have to go back and look.
I only gave this 3 moons as the story arc, in contrast with the visual storytelling, was entirely too predictable. I foresaw the ending based on the first few scenes of the first episode. I kept thinking that aspect of the story was going to surprise me, but it never did. I won’t offer any more spoilers than that. I also felt it dragged from episodes 6-8, in part because they ended up re-using the same flashbacks over multiple episodes. This all made the predictable ending even more of a let down, as if I could have skipped a few episodes and still gotten the same effect. Overall, worth the watch if you don’t mind the gore. (Definitely do not watch with children!)