Posted in: Anime, Crunchyroll, TV | Tagged: anime, comedy thriller, Crunchyroll, manga, spy x family, Tatsuya Ando

Spy x Family: Madcap Spy Comedy-Thriller Focuses on Found Family

This weekend sees the premiere of Spy x Family, Crunchyroll's flagship show in their Spring 2022 anime lineup, a wacky spy comedy anime about a fake family created for an espionage mission that slowly becomes real. The adaptation of Tatsuya Ando's manga is one of the most hyped new anime series of the Spring 2022 season

Set in a fictional, thinly-disguised,  Cold War world of East-West tensions, Codename: Twilight is the West's greatest spy, a lone wolf operator who can do anything. His latest mission demands he poses as a family man with a wife and kid as an unavoidable part of his cover. As an operator who cut off all prospects of a normal romance and family life Twilight, now under his new cover name of Loid Forger, goes off to an orphanage to adopt an eligible kid. He decides on Anya, a precocious 6-year-old desperate for a family that would care for her. What he doesn't know is she's a telepath who can read his mind. She realizes right off that he's a spy, and as a fan of spy adventures, she's only too eager to be his new daughter. He'll go on to pick the shy, socially awkward Yor, who's secretly an assassin. Neither Yor nor Loid knows what the other really is and they don't know Anya is a telepath. She's the only one who knows the truth about all of them, and she's going to do whatever it takes to keep her new family together. Oh yeah, she's 6 years old and acts exactly like a 6-year-old. Hilarity ensues.

The anime pilot deviates slightly from the first installment of the manga. The story has a darkness at its core – Loid's adoption of Anya is initially cold, bordering on heartless and abusive, even monstrous, but the undertone of child abuse is offset by the farcical comedy. The story goes for sentimentality as soon as possible, revealing his traumatic childhood origin to make him much more sympathetic. The manga played on Loid's stillness in contrast to Anya's perfectly normal child-like impulses and uses still images to create a tone of deadpan comedy. Loid's unflappable facade cracking to reveal his panic is frequently hilarious. The anime is less deadpan and uses motion to convey humour. Under the Cold War spy shenanigans, Spy x Family is really an allegory about a man suddenly confronted with fatherhood, and it's about a family where both parents are socially awkward geeks who have to raise a child.

Spy x  Family is now streaming on Crunchyroll.

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