Posted in: Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh, Movies, Recent Updates | Tagged: anime, entertainment, otaku, The Devil is a Part Timer, tv

When You Meet The Devil at Your Burger Joint – Look! It Moves! By Adi Tantimedh

Published Mon, 06 Jan 2014 11:00:00 -0600

by Hannah Means Shannon

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Adi Tantimedh writes:

The Devil is a Part-Timer is one of the funniest shows of this past season that just happens to be an anime.

Japanese anime and manga pop culture seems to come up with effortlessly coherent high concept ideas where Hollywood and US comics tend to struggle. This one is almost a no-brainer. In a land and a time far away, Satan's demonic armies finally face defeat at the hands of human resistance led by a Divine hero. Satan uses the last of his magic to open a portal and escapes with his most trusted general, vowing to return and conquer the land anew. However, they now have to survive in this strange new land they're in. A land that is…

…Modern Japan.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe9gQt-x_BE[/youtube]

Their magic depleted, their bodies reduced to those of twenty-something human men, the dark lord and his general have to find a way to survive in this world without any practical skills or professional qualifications while trying to find a way to replenish their magical powers and return to their world. The best he can find is a minimum-wage job at the local burger chain, the oddly familiar-sounding MgRonald's.

The Demon Lord, never one to be down for long, decides upon a new plan. He would work his way up in his new occupation and get to the top of his fast-food industry job, and eventually conquer this world before he returns to his own!

However, first, he has to watch his budget, pays his rent and bills on time and deal with the fact that his nemesis has followed him to this world to defeat him once and for all. The half-angel warrior Emilia and some of her compatriots are now in Tokyo as well, watching his every move, daring him to do something evil, whereupon she would strike him down with her divine blade. And being a hero, she has her act together more than he does – she's found a better-paying job in phone technical support and lives in a better apartment than his dingy studio flat, burning with the obsessive drive to kill him forever.

The Devil is a Part-Timer does brilliantly what Buffy and its spinoff Angel pioneered, which is to juxtapose the fantasy genre with the real world for social metaphor and satirical comedy. Many fantasy shows since have similar settings but neglect the comedy part, choosing a more emo, po-faced approach to genre. It's a bit of a surprise that this would be one of the few shows that actually took the comedic approach. It uses the fantasy genre to show up the absurdity of modern life and vice versa. It re-contextualizes these archetypes from epic fantasy into comedy oddballs and reverses the fantasies that people in lowly dead-end jobs might have, where these characters really are epic fantasy archetypes but are trapped in mundane lives.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyhA783u4Qg[/youtube]

The demon lord's most feared general is reduced to the role of neurotic roommate fussing over the household expenses, cleaning and cooking and having nervous breakdowns over not doing his job perfectly.

The Heroic knight Emilia, despite having perfectly solid motivations, ends up looking like an embittered and stalker-y ex-girlfriend to everyone else instead of a heroic knight out to avenge the slaughter of her village and death of her family. She comes off as angry and hysterical and makes the demon lord look reasonable by default. The most exciting thing to happen to him is his promotion to shift manager.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytrWZaTAj2k[/youtube]

The main character follows a certain tradition in British fantasy comedy where the villain is the put-upon, exasperated Captain Sensible of the story. There's even a teenage co-worker who has a crush on him and is even more enamoured when she discovers he's a demon lord from another dimension. Another fallen angel-turned-demon becomes a teenage shut-in hooked on the internet and video games.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO3kZJqChOc[/youtube]

The basic premise of the story isn't actually Japanese at all. The Devil, his friends and enemies come not from Japanese folklore or pop culture but from Western fantasy and table-top role-playing game conventions. The fish-out-of-water comedy is a tried-and-true genre, but the revealing part is its inherently conservative celebration of the stability of Japanese society and conformity. The demon lord grows rather fond of his life as a lowly employee and even protective of the people he meets, as if acting like an affable, well-intentioned Japanese man has turned him into precisely that. There's none of that discontent you would find in a British or American character in the same situation or the many hassles and problems you might encounter in a Western setting. Some of the jokes in the series are based on just how well-behaved the Japanese are. If this were the US, the main character would be contending with slacker co-workers smoking weed, horrible customers whose food the staff regularly spit or wank into, and other unpleasant parts of American life.

Adapted from a series of light novels, The Devil is a Part-Timer can't resist its otaku trappings, including the sexist fanservice and the hot women being nuts around a sensible and affably clueless main character who's clearly meant to be someone the main target audience would identify with, even though here he's the Lord of Evil, albeit increasingly reformed. And he constantly rescues or talks sense into them, since male writers and fans don't want female characters that pass the Bechdel Test. It at least sidesteps the creepy sexual turn the story could have taken by avoiding the main character ever contemplating relationships with a human woman since he's a demon lord and sees humans as a different species. What makes it worth watching is the comedy and social commentary.

The Devil is a Part-Timer is now streaming on Hulu and Funimation.

Grandiose ambitions at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

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