I'll never stop watching new anime, and I feel for people who imagine that there's no further point it can reach. Despite all odds I firmly believe that there's always something new to see, some new experience I couldn't have dreamed of. 2018 validated me right out of the gate, and what's more it did so with a remake of a 40 year old series, and with only ten episodes produced by and released on a Western site known for treating their anime releases like crap. Even with two of my favorite creators in the industry, Yuasa Masaaki and Eunyoung Choi, bringing their artistic sensibilities to one of the unrestrained and unhinged works of the 70's without a restriction on sexual or violent content, I thought the good and bad would compromise and give us something easily summed up as “solid”. But no, DEVILMAN crybaby is the highest realization of both the Devilman franchise and Yuasa's X-rated monster stories that we saw right from the start with the brilliant but flawed Kemonozume. It's electrifying but controlled, far-reaching but unpretentious, and a blend of sexuality and violence that exists for more than titillation and shock.
Having taken all core events directly from Nagai Go's original Devilman manga, many of the events and twists aren't so surprising nor are they where the freshness or power of DEVILMAN crybaby come from. The transformation of Fudo Akira from a pure and innocent high school boy to a brooding sex symbol at the hands of merging with the demon Amon to become the half-human Devilman is the sort of character story we see all over the place nowadays, but it must've been shocking when Nagai first gave him this metamorphisis, catalyzed by his best friend Asuka Ryou going on a stabbing rampage at an underground sex party in order to spark the demons waiting at that ancient site of hedonism and carnal desire. Of course in retrospect both the party and Akira's transformation seem tame, when Yuasa and Choi found a way to show near full-on psychedelic sex in the very first episode, trading an earlier scene of exposition in exchange for stretching both the party and the gory aftermath out by a factor of two. Add to this the front half of the episode, where Ryou picks up his childhood friend Akira with them both sharing a goofy smile, even as he points a machine gun at a Greek chorus of beat boxers and Akira's crush and adoptive family Makimura Miki to dissuade them from chasing the pair as they jump into Ryou's Western sports car, and we can start to see how DEVILMAN crybaby has chosen a far more wondrous and dizzying take on Nagai's story even while staying true to core events.
Besides this way of following key events with vastly different details, the other major change is the addition or emphasis on dozens of side characters meant to draw characterization out of each other and out of the trio of Akira, Ryou, and Miki. Miki in particular is taken out of the role of Akira's horny love interest and becomes the moral and “human” center of the show by way of her fame as a runner, and the feelings this provokes in her running partner Kuroda Miki, who unwillingly relinquished the name Miki to the track star and takes a back role as Miko. The beatboxers from the first episode appear occasionally at the start of an episode to rap out the morals of the world as they see it—all of them were written and sung by actual Japanese beatboxers who also voiced the characters—but starting around the halfway point of the show they also become active characters in and of themselves, with huge ideological differences we wouldn't have spotted when they all rapped together. Akira's parents barely play a role in the show, with only one episode of exposition on his family situation, but in exchange his adoptive family the Makimura's become an active barometer for Akira's role as a half demon half human, a support for Miki as she remains the voice of humanity surrounded by jealous friends and demons, and a key face of family in the show's brutal second half.
The show practically exists as two separate entities: the first half, where Akira fights demons in the shadows with Ryou's assistance, and the second half, where humans and demons wage all-out war on one another. The first deals with the more emotional turmoils of the cast: jealousy, friendship lost, corruption and sexual assault, family, adolescent sexuality, and some questions about when to commit inhumane acts in the name of the greater good. The second half asks a much more salient question: what distinguishes human fear, opportunism, and anarchy from the notion of a demon? One might say this question is trite and overplayed at this point, but DEVILMAN crybaby covers it from a dozen angles in shocking and poignant ways. The ultimate good in humanity, embodied by Akira's fight and Miki's heart, is not at all fated to win in the end, as this persistent but delicate moral rightness is forced to stand against violence and a crushing lack of hope like a candle in the wind.
One moment in particular, nearly inconsequential to the plot, brought this feeling home for me. A father reunites with his family in a dirty refuge camp just in time to see his demon son eating his wife, lying pitifully on the ground with her legs hanging out of his mouth and a tear in his eye. The father, angry but torn, points the gun at his unrecognizable son eight times, and all eight times he drops the gun and looks away. Each time he steels his resolve through the tears in his eyes, saying lines like “you're no longer my son”, but each time it drops uselessly to his side. After the eighth time, a military unit comes up and as the father spreads his arms to protect his son they tear through both in a hail of bullets, the father's last protective gesture completely useless. The Japanese have a famous saying of shichiten battou, “fall down seven times but get up eight”. As the gun fell to his side for the eighth time I couldn't help thinking about shichiten battou, and whether humanity would ever be able to get back up from their fall.
Yuasa has always had a way to ponder over seemingly overused tropes in a way that lays humanity bare, such as his world trekker in Ping Pong the Animation or the snickering Ozu from The Tatami Galaxy, and it's wonderful to see every aspect of Devilman that he decided to emphasize. Miki suffers through sexual exploitation on account of her trust in others, yet Miko finds herself so frustrated with Miki's naive dominance over her in track that she tries to steal even that, anything to give her validation and the sense that someone is looking at her over Miki. Every one of the major characters is either gay or bisexual, and we know this not because of a deep dark secret or coming out story but because of their sexual and romantic encounters, which are presented as facts of their lives rather than moral transgressions or climactic (excuse the pun) defining moments. Adolescent sexuality is a passing moment of finding porn online, of shooting the breeze on the side of a track meet, and of frustrated nights and wet dreams.
By contrast to this ability to view humanity in all its simplicity and genuine glimmers of the mundane, everything else, again as expected from Yuasa and Choi, is out of this world. When the Sabbath party of the first episode features a rave with techno music and psychedelic sex, it's a tip-off that we are in for a visual and auditory treat. Maybe it's clear from the outset, with the show's pulsing opening done by a legendary 21st century Japanese techno group Denki Groove set in front of stark statue-like visuals in dark swirling shadows, or the model of having one solid color per outlined block not dissimilar to last year's The Reflection, stemming from DEVILMAN crybaby's use of Flash as opposed to the usual industry tools. Besides Denki Groove's opening Man-Human and the recurring remix of the original Devilman's classic opening Devilman no Uta, the up-and-coming composer Ushio Kensuke of Yuasa's Ping Pong the Animation and Yamada Naoko's brilliant A Silent Voice brings a whole range of driving electronic tracks, and with the beatboxing written by KEN THE 390 and a heart-wrenching insert song closing out the second to last episode, there's a force behind all of Nagai's storywork. More specifically I want to praise not just the music but how it was used, sparingly but often in moments where it usually wouldn't to add energy and keep us on edge.
Yuasa also stated in an interview that one of the purposes of DEVILMAN crybaby was to recenter the discussion on the bond between Akira and Ryou, and in the later episodes the detatched and almost deus-ex-machina-like Ryou starts to evolve towards Devilman's legendary ending. There was one odd choice in the first half of the show, where Ryou was removed from a key self-sacrificial scene where he saves Akira from the clutches of one of Devilman's key demons Silene, but to make up for it his role in inciting the human-demon war of the second half comes to the forefront, and through a series of flashbacks both of his past in isolation and with Akira we get a firm sense of the existence known as Asuka Ryou. How it culminates, and his relationship with humans, demons, and his best friend trapped in between both, makes him one of the most classically tragic figures in recent anime history. From the Greek statue figures in the opening to the Greek chorus to the tragedy of Ryou, DEVILMAN crybaby shoots past being based on a decades-old manga, and takes on a tradition of centuries-old storytelling, but with little moments of adolescence and an overwhelming off-kilter style both Nagai and the storytellers of the old epics could only dream of. I'm gratefully speechless.