Masaaki Yuasa is a director I have fathomless respect for; Mind Game, Night Is Short Walk On Girl, Inu-ou, The Tatami Galaxy and Ping Pong are all in my all-time Hall of Fame for both TV and film, with a couple being some of the only media I can say made me a different person for having come out the other side. He has this unmimicable ability to combine beautiful and grotesque images with hilarious and touching characters and narratives to display the awkwardness of finding yourself, in all its shambolic glory, and my appreciation for him grows more the further I get through life. No matter what searing embarrassment or phantasmagoric visual metaphor the protagonist is thrown through, he keeps it fun, light-hearted, and breathes fresh and unique life into otherwise oversaturated genres.

I cannot say the same for Devilman Crybaby.

DC (as I'll call it from here on) is really fucking depressing. It's not evident from the get-go, in fact the pure gonzo energy of the anime's first half makes it feel almost comical, but by the end I was, indeed, crying quite a lot. Like all of Yuasa's work, the music and visuals are real stand-outs here, with the soundtrack flipping from thick doom-mongering synths to gentle house kicks and heartfelt piano, and the animation depicts gruesome transformations, dismemberment, torture and a lot of sex with great expression and flair. The heavy psychedelia found in works like Night Is Short or Mind Game is given occasional spotlight, but for the most part, effort is funnelled solely into pure ludicrous horror. The characters are given a lot of care in their designs, making them quite personable (which helps bring the agony once certain ones are killed off, naming no names), and the demons can range from utterly inspired to relatively simple and unmemorable, though the latter is often reserved for filling up the screen a bit. They can't all be zingers.

I won't dwell on plot too much, since despite its short runtime it manages to be a very effective thriller, and had a decent amount of twists and unexpected reveals to keep me suspicious of practically everyone, but I'll at least mention that the main players are given solid characterisation. Growth feels natural and is employed to marvellous, heart-touching effect in some cases, whereas others come off a little sudden and inconsequential, in the case of a couple side characters. The relationship between Ryo and Akira is fleshed out very well over the course of the 10 episodes, with enough discontextualised nuggets to keep you thinking until the story comes to a close, although (without spoiling), I found the weight of the final scene a little lacking in comparison to the pure torment that gets unleashed in episode 9. In fact, episode 10 in general felt vaguely anticlimactic, though considering the themes its conveying, I don't doubt that this was vaguely on purpose.

My only real gripe is that Yuasa isn't much of a presence for much of the series. It really feels like his strong moral centre and powerful understanding and wielding of emotion only comes into play in the last 2-3 episodes, which is certainly better than it not being present at all, but it can make the first 7 or so feel a little superficial, almost. DC is almost certainly a very fucking cool anime, but it struggles to rise out of being that and only that. While the content of the first half is followed up on very well, I found myself occasionally wondering, "Is this gonna be it for this episode? Tits and demons?" In fact, I'm sure a case could be made that the show blows its spectacle-laden load a little too early, and that there isn't enough to fully flesh out the final episode, but I couldn't focus too much on how cool everything looked due to the tears in my eyes by episode 8 or so. Everything that could go wrong does go wrong, and I guess a part of me thought Yuasa would have more to say on the apocalypse than semi-baked Book of Revelation references (where are the nine horns on the seven heads :<) and nihilistic malice, but it was incredibly interesting seeing this openly edgy and dark material from Yuasa in the first place. I didn't regret my time with DC at all, I found it to be a deeply resonant and powerful anime by the time the credits rolled on the tenth episode, but I can't see myself revisiting it nearly as often as I do his other material.