Devilman Crybaby

Considering all the praise I have seen for it predating my watch I am lef quite dissapointed. To start off I recognise and greately respect the Devilman manga and its contribution and itroduction to various tropes alongside the great inspiration to various other manga and anime like Chainsawman, Berserk and Evangelion. It is truly revolutional in its storytelling but kinda a product of its time. I will steal a point from a reddit comment that I saw: "It was groundbreaking in the 70s and then the whole industry was built arround it". I want to say that the first 8 episodes were a tremendous drag filled with useless violence and nudity briefly intercepted with semi-interesting to borderline masterpiece moments. I would say that unless it was 10 episodes and was such unanimously praised in my eyes I might have dropped it. The nudity was excessive and often (if not always) unneaded but in contrast I did not mind all the brutality (in the sence that it was well made, not that it was not borderline traumatising at moments). Most of the "filler" truly lived up to its name as almost all of the minor characters especially the other Devilmen did not really do much. They did not intrigue me and did not show any aspect of the story that Akira could not. Speaking of him, while he was a typical "loser protagonist finds special power and turns into grumpy Chad" he was in no way as annoying as most of the characters of that type are. Ryo was the true show stealer with both an amazing redesign and a decent backstory. The dynamic of Akira and Ryo was pretty rushed and while original at the time does not hold that well. It has been perfected in later projects (like the ones I mentioned above) and the dating of the orginal sorce material shows. Miki was an undewheliming love interest/trtagonist and did not do anything of substence other that one or two heartfelt scenes with different characters and truly works more as a token "girl of the group" rather then her own character. The ending was truly the highlight for me. The reveal was decent enough and the commentary on human nature and war was surprisingly profound concidering the rest of my experience with the story. Allinal nothing that special but still interesting of you want to see the inspiration for a lot of newer anime.