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Posted in: Anime, Crunchyroll, Review, TV | Tagged: anime, Crunchyroll, Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction, Inio Asano, manga, science fiction, slice of life, streaming
Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction Ep. 0 Sets Wrong Tone: Review
REVIEW: Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction Episode 0 is a generic thriller prelude to what's supposed to be a surreal slice-of-life story.
Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction is an unusual blend of two manga genres on opposite ends of the spectrum: the apocalyptic thriller and the slice-of-life dramedy. Inio Asano's manga series is a hit for taking two familiar forms and them into a new thing, a story that's both disquieting and oddly funny, occasionally at the same time. An anime adaptation is slightly unexpected but also eagerly anticipated because its combination of the epic and the intimate requires a delicate balance that, if done right, can be quite special.
Alas, Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction is not special. It is the opposite of everything that made the original manga special. It introduces a completely new and separate storyline that doesn't even feature the heroine.
The Main Character Does Not Show Up in the Opening Episode
Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction Episode 0 is an opening chapter before the main character is introduced. The prelude is about Nobuo Koyama, a tired manga creator trying to meet his deadlines and having equally tired arguments with his editors about what stories to tell, approaching middle age and watching his peers struggling to stay in the industry after disappointing sales of their work and dropping out from despair. As Nobuo sits in a cab during rush hour, pondering his career prospects, a massive spaceship descends on Tokyo, blocking out the sky before falling on top of him and several hundred people.
The next thing he knows, he wakes up in some kind of makeshift refugee camp in the city, and two young women tell him he was in a coma eight years ago. Worse, an alien took over his body during those eight years and a lot has changed. Tokyo is in ruins, millions of people are dead or evacuated, and possessed people have given birth to half-alien kids. What was he doing, or rather, what was the alien doing in his body during his eight years in a coma? He has a daughter he needs to find, and then all hell breaks loose when members of an extremist pro-human terrorist group are chasing him with guns, intent on experimenting on him to find out if he's still human or half-alien. He's rescued by another group of young women who know who he is, because they're friends with his daughter. They show him a picture of her when she was in college during his lost years.
Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction: New, Conventional Opening Episode Not The Real Story
Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction Episode 0 is not like what the manga series is about or like. It sets up expectations that the series will be a violent thriller with the increasingly common themes of xenophobic terrorist groups and aliens as metaphors for refugees suffering victimization and survival in the apocalypse. Every other Science Fiction anime series has been regurgitating these increasingly tired themes, and they have nothing to do with Asano's original manga! If you've never read the manga, this opening chapter might be a complete surprise, and if you never read the manga, you've been led to think this is a chase thriller set in the shadow of a devastating alien invasion. It foregrounds the thriller part of this world where it was always the background of the manga's real story.
If you didn't read the manga, you wouldn't think anything, but for manga readers, this opener is a tonal and thematic whiplash. What made the original manga fresh and surprising was its focus on the surrealism of trying to live a normal life after aliens invade the Earth as a metaphor for coming-of-age and growing up as a slice-of-life comedy. It feels like the producers didn't trust the tone of the original manga and decided to force it into a more conventional thriller when the manga was not a thriller at all but a surreal high school comedy. The heroine and her goofy school friends in the original manga version of Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction are interesting and funny enough to make the manga sell a few million copies, and it's a shame that the opening episode is not the real story. She doesn't even show up in this prelude. That's episode one next week.
Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction is streaming on Crunchyroll.
Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction
6.5/10
The original manga series is a humane, surreal, slice-of-life comedy about growing up in the wake of an apocalyptic alien invasion, but the pilot of the anime adaptation of Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction opens the series with a misleading, conventional and cliched chase thriller. With the opener full of guns and violence that might mislead viewers into thinking it's a conventional thriller instead of a high school. coming-of-age movie, we can only hope that the episodes that follow take a different approach.
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