Devilman

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by Jason Henderson
webdate: 10/6/99 6:24:11 PM

Devilman, Vol. 1
from Manga video

Sometimes I watch an anime and I see how differently the events of the story might unfold if this were a different kind of feature. I was thinking about this particularly when, sometime in the second half of Devilman, Volume 1, the virtuous and pleasantly bland protagonist Akira faces an opportunity to become a demon.

It happens this way: Akira has learned that there are demons everywhere, they killed his parents, and there's a bunch of them waiting in the discotheque down the hall (don't ask.) His creepy friend and mentor Ryo informs him that the only way to defeat a demon is to join with a demon, hope that you can overcome the murderous rages that demon powers bestow upon you, and tear the bad demons to shreds. Akira's response, essentially: "open the door and let the demonic powers fall where they may."

I'm convinced that if you were Batman, the response would be "wait-- there must be another way!"

Indiana Jones? "I won't listen to you, 'old friend'-- you're a demon in disguise!" (Sock!)

Fred and Velma? "Wait! There are no demons! You're just trying to invalidate your father's will!"

All of which is to say that the choices the characters make in any given story are essentially preordained by the gods of whatever genre the characters inhabit. And in the peculiar genre of Devilman, which I suppose you'd call "hyper-violent demon wars," the characters tend to make whatever choices involve the most splattering blood.

Yes, Devilman is one of those. Although never for an instant nearly as offensive as blood-soaked fair such as Legend of the Overfiend and Ninja Scroll, Devilman features plenty of stomach churning images to amuse and titillate, as they used to say. Luckily, I suppose, most of this gore is demon gore, meaning barely recognizable snakes and serpents are being torn to shreds. Icky, icky, icky.

And yet, and some might take me to task for this, there is a strange sort of innocence about Devilman. As exploitative as it might seem, Devilman has an interesting premise at its heart: Akira, a very nice young man, chooses to meld with a demon in order to defeat the demons who have slain his parents and are now attacking the earth. Over the course of the serious, we will watch Akira master his demonic powers and fight to retain his own humanity. When Akira appears as Devilman, he becomes a sort of dark superhero: exciting, muscular, and huge. The design of the character Devilman tempts you're in the same way that the character is tempted -- to find the violence attractive. Pull back another step and you recognize that the anime itself does exactly this, calling on us to vicariously thrill at the slaughter of the villains, and hopefully avoid our own guilt because, after all, that's just demon flesh.

There are some truly remarkable moments in Devilman. Several times we're given dreamy, almost lyrically to violent images of the primordial world. And this is a primordial world not unlike that of Disney's Fantasia, except that here, demons and fairies, disgusting and beautiful, overrun the plane, devouring and destroying one another in a grand natural ballet. These are strange and beautifully imagined sequences.

I don't know if I enjoyed this are not. I do know that Devilman was upsetting for parents even in Japan, where television is often far more violent than it is here. The difference was that Devilman, featuring a superhero sorts, was aimed at children. The way I usually feel about such things it is, if I were twelve, I'd love it a lot more than I do approaching thirty, because I understand pain a lot more. Sometimes I think, the older we get, the more disturbed we are by images we see.

Even demon pain is still pain.

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