His name is Twilight. If you’ve heard of him, it’s already too late for you. With the nation of Westalis embroiled in political strife with Ostania, the greatest spy in the country has been sent to Berlint on a mission to bring the two nations back from the brink of war. In order to do this, he’ll need to establish a fake family with himself as the patriarch. Posing as the fictitious psychiatrist Lloyd Forger, Twilight quickly adopts a spirited little girl, and offers a mutually beneficial sham marriage to a 27 year old office worker, and begins his mission to close in on one Damian Desmond by enrolling his adoptive daughter in the same school as Desmond’s second son. Little does he now, his fake family has secrets of their own, as his bogus bride is secretly a deadly femme fatale, and his dubious daughter has the ability to read minds! Will these salacious secrets become Twilight’s undoing, or will this bizarre little assortment of misfits prove that they were actually the perfect family all along?

Spy X Family was the product of two animation studios, going by the names of Wit Studio and Cloverworks. As it turns out, it’s not the only anime to sport both names on its pedigree. In 2022, it was announced that Cloverworks, Wit Studio, publisher Shueisha and distributor Aniplex had come together to form one joint company called JOEN, looking to bring the best of two acclaimed animation studios together so all projects moving through them would only be in the best possible hands, with Spy X Family being one of their very first projects together. Both studios do have their own long, established histories with primary animation duties and much smaller roles... At their peaks, Wit Studio produced the lion’s share of Attack on Titan, and Cloverworks brought us such critically acclaimed titles as Promised Neverland and the Rascal Does Not franchise... And I’m not entirely sure which titles they’ve worked together on since this merger, but if Spy x Family is anything to go off of, they’re a match made in heaven.

In terms of visual quality, Spy x Family is basically perfect. I’m serious, I have no notes, I don’t think I noticed a single flaw throughout the entire 12 episodes that make up this first portion of the series. Don’t get me wrong, this show wasn’t throwing around mid-2000s Kyoto Animation money, the animation isn’t consistently over-performing for more than half the runtime, but it is safe to say the budget was exactly high enough for whatever the animators wanted to do at any given time. Slower movements are kept slow, there are key frames here and there, but there’s always an effort made to keep actual character motion looking as graceful and fluid as needed, only occasionally throwing an extra few frames into character specific actions that could have easily been skipped to save money, but were still included to give the cast more immersive identities. I did notice some runny eggs framing once or twice, but it’s only used sparingly in action scenes in ways you won’t notice unless you’re looking for it.

Speaking of action, you do get a decent helping of it, and it is a blast. The comedic slapstick action is over the top in its presentation in a way that kind of reminds me of One Punch Man, despite the fact that nothing about this show’s production had anything in common with that series. When the action needs to be more serious, it is taken more seriously... The framing gets tighter, the lighting gets darker, and the animation gets quicker and less sensational than the comedic violence, although we’ll be discussing their differences more later. Either way, the action is effective no matter what tone it’s trying to strike. The character designs have a sort of western edge to them, as adults are portrayed as more or less anatomically correct, and children are portrayed as chibis with little bodies and big heads with exaggerated features and hairstyles(which, okay, a FEW adults also have). Their levels of expressiveness match this disparity like a glove. Throw in a generic fictitious European setting that looks like a cross between Germany and Italy with a Baccano-esque soundtrack to match, and you have a very on-point anime series in terms of production.

The English dub was a Crunchyroll effort, and an impressive one to boot. I don’t think Alex Organ would have been my first choice for the role of Twilight... I’ve only seen a few other anime that he’s in, and even out of those, I don’t remember HIM whatsoever... This character feels like it was practically designed for J Michael Tatum, but hey, if you can’t get him, Organ still proves to be a worthy second choice. His character has a nuance to his duplicity, as his secret scheming side and his jovial family mad side aren’t completely mutually exclusive to each other, and it’s a line that Organ walks skillfully. There’s a bit more of an obvious divide between the two halves of Yor Forger’s character, but she proves just as capable, even though I’m even less familiar with her work than Organ’s. Megan Shipman, on the other hand, in the role of Anya Forger? She is the star of this dub, I swear she understands Anya better than any other actress doing a child-like voice could. Anya is already a thoroughly believable child character, and Shipman’s delivery is just as authentically child-like as you could get. Other stand-outs include Anthony Bowling, Dallas Reid and Stephanie Young, as well as Dani Chambers and Caitlin Glass as two of Anya’s classmates. It’s a fantastic dub.

Spy x Family is easily one of the most popular anime to come out in recent years, piercing into the American anime zeitgeist almost as well as shows like Attack on Titan and Demon Slayer, which is strange for what’s essentially a slice of life family comedy. I’ve probably built up a reputation as something of a contrarian over the years, but in this case, I agree, Spy x Family is totally great and it deserves to be as popular as it is. Now I could just stop right there, having affirmed what a lot of people coming into this review wanted to see... Validation of their own popular opinion... But since I like to pride myself on being the oddball even when I’m going the same exact direction of the crowd, I do have more to say than just “I agree.” For starters, if you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, you all should know by this point that I love when a piece of media presents an interesting, weird or unique idea and actually goes all the way with exploring and fleshing it out, and oh boy, does this series check the fuck out of that box.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A spy adopts a mind reader and marries an assassin, but the spy and the assassin don’t know about each other, and the mind reader has to pretend not to know either of her new parents’ secret identities in order to keep the family together. I’m not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that this is one of the greatest story premises I’ve ever heard. It’s an easy pitch; It's so simple to explain, and there are immediately several layers of appeal and promising possibilities that jump straight to your mind. Even better, the writer of this story did not slouch. Tatsuya Endo clearly knew what kind of lightning in a bottle idea he had come up with, and he left nothing on the table. He came up with every joke, every entertaining scenario, every complication and every necessary plot contrivance that he would need to use to keep the story moving at a fun pace and endear the characters to the audience, both as individuals and as a found family unit. I don’t know, maybe a few ideas got left out, but I have to imagine they would have thrown off the balance of a very well-balanced series.

Speaking of balance, I think the main reason this series is balanced as well as it is is because of how grounded everything is. It might not feel that way at first, considering how over the top some of it can get, but even at its most extreme there is some degree of restraint holding it all together and keeping it from ever jumping the shark. This is probably most noticeable with the more violent elements of the story, which can range from silly to serious, and there are quite a few anime out there that have trouble walking that line. One of my biggest issues with Your Lie in April was how the slapstick violence undermined the more serious and complex abuse that the main character suffered as a child... Not because that slapstick existed, but because it featured a Looney Tunes level of consequences. When the main character was hit in the head with a baseball and was found lying face down in a pool of blood, he got right back up and was fine in the next shot. So, when I see his mother beating his head bloody, what the hell am I supposed to feel about that? The fucking baseball didn’t do any lasting damage.

In Spy x Family, when something violent happens, it fucking happens, no matter what the intention of the scene was. Even when somebody gets punched in the face in a comedic scene, there are lasting consequences, and injuries have to heal. At the same time, the narrative doesn’t shy away from the violent nature of Yor’s job, as we may not see her kill very many people on screen, but we’re not sheltered from the fact that it happens, nor from the effects that her line of work has had on her psychologically. Part of this is due to the fact that this series has a gleefully dark sense of humor. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not dark enough to cross any major lines or to ever be in bad taste, but our main characters live in a cold world full of violence and cruelty, which makes the bright and positive bond they share as a family shine through even brighter. There are moments in this series where I can’t help but imagine the series creator giggling to himself uncontrollably while writing them, like in the flashbacks where Yor’s brother takes her coming home from work covered in a target’s blood as “She’s working herself bloody for me!” or that damn dodgeball game against a giant.

Having said all that, as fun and entertaining as this show is, I do have a couple of issues with it, and they’re not minor. First off, I feel like there are quite a few weaknesses in the structure of this season, chief among them being several instances where something will happen in the middle of an episode that feels more satisfying and impactful than the actual ending of the episode. The storyline revolving around Yor’s brother, for example, is about an episode long, but it takes place over half of one episode and half of the next episode, which ends on an entirely unrelated note. This sounds like the unfortunate drawback of anime telling continuous stories, rather than being episodic like western cartoons, but this usually isn’t a problem for other anime, which are able to shuffle things around just enough to preserve a neater sense of pacing. I don’t feel right when paragraphs in my reviews bleed into each other the way Spy x Family’s stories bleed from episode to episode, so to see it happen in an actual anime is a bit distracting for me.

Another issue probably isn’t the anime’s fault, but the first season is split into two halves, which means I have to review each half separately, and I don’t think the story was written with this approach in mind, because episode twelve does not feel like an adequate finale, and yet here I am, forced to judge it as such. This also leaves a couple of plot points hanging, because in a previous episode, Anya stated she wanted a dog, and we’re shown a poor unfortunate doggo that the story is setting up to be hers, and then the subject is just dropped, presumably to be picked up again in the second half. This feels kinda sloppy, not gonna lie. And my last issue is the title. Remember in my Welcome to the Ballroom review, how I said the prefix “Welcome to” makes any title instantly sound cooler to me? Well, the opposite phenomenon occurs with ‘blank x blank’ titles. Any title where you have an x inserted between two words, and you’re probably not supposed to say the x, is just the cringiest thing ever. X is already an overrated letter to begin with, and I am so freaking tired of seeing it used like this in anime titles.

But no matter how many problems I may have with this series, none of them could ever smother its best quality... Anya. Yes, that cotton candy haired walking meme template, Anya is both the heart, the soul and the backbone of this series. I mentioned earlier that she is a believable child character, and I meant it, just about everything about her feels authentic, with the exception of her mind reading ability. I believe the way she talks, I believe the way TV influences her perspective of the world, I believe her occasional mispronunciations, I believe her complete and utter sincerity in everything she does, tempered with a touch of both the naivety of youth, and the borderline traumatizing information she’s picked up through her telepathy. This isn’t the first anime I’ve seen that explored the realistic effects of a toddler developing telepathic powers, but I kinda see this and Kotoura-san as two sides of the same coin... The tragic, pessimistic side, and the comedic, optimistic side. Oh, and her facial expressions are funny as fuck, and I hope whoever makes her nendoroid figures has been riding them to the fucking bank.

Spy x Family is available from Crunchyroll, and can also be streamed on Amazon and Hulu. The second half of this season, and a second season, both of which I’ll review if this one does well, are similarly available. The original manga by Tatsuya Endo is available from Viz Media.

There’s a lot to love about Spy x Family, and while this first installment falls a bit short of perfection, the few issues it has aren’t quite serious enough to make it any less enjoyable. It is a shame that season one is split up into two halves, because if I remember correctly, the two halves work better together than they do on their own. Either way, this is a super fun series with an aura of confidence that never lets up, that never loses steam, and which gives a whole new meaning to the classic Found Family trope. The action is sparse, but exciting. Its sense of humor is dark, and yet it never comes off as mean spirited. It’s a well balanced show that seamlessly blends several different tones far better than most other shows could, and I’m definitely looking forward to continuing on to the next chapter in this thrilling, chilling and heartwarming family adventure.

I give Spy X Family an 8/10