Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.
The last seasonal anime I blogged was Heike Monogatari in the fall of 2021. Since then, I’ve kicked the habit of watching anime on a weekly basis, usually burning through a handful of shows toward the end of each quarter. Personal favorites of mine have aired over the last three years, including Tatami Time Machine Blues, Do It Yourself, and Skip and Loafer, but I’ve always watched them at my own pace, never feeling the need to write about them.
Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction is different. As the first animated adaptation of an Inio Asano manga, it’s making history in real time, but I’m not such an Asano fan that I felt compelled to cover it for just that reason. The only work of his that I’ve ever read cover to cover is Oyasumi Punpun, and while it certainly left an impression, it didn’t make a convert out of me. No, the real reason I want to write about Dead Dead Demon is simply to leave a record of its existence on this site – to enter it into the annals of a blog that was originally founded to cover similarly strange and wonderful anime.
Perhaps it’s Demon’s extraterrestrial theme that kick-started this thought process. If aliens ever visit Earth and make an attempt at cataloging our culture, there’s virtually no chance they’ll stop to translate this post, or any of the three others I plan to make about this show in the coming weeks. But what if that near-zero possibility becomes reality? If they identify Japanese animation as a significant touchstone among young people in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, I want Dead Dead Demon to be fractionally better represented in their research, even if that fraction amounts to a single one or zero in a digital ocean.
In case you’re human, though, a quick note on the best way to watch this series: there’s a sub group called Alinanonymous that has currently released the first three episodes with an original translation, which is far more accurate than the heavily localized dubtitles accompanying the official release. Their script leaves Japanese terms such as “kappa” and “BL” untouched, rather than replacing them with “imps” and “fantasizing about boys,” and it doesn’t invent or augment dialogue in unnecessary fashion. Alinanonymous’ progress is slow, however, so if you just want a cleaned up version of the CR stream, there’s 4de’s release, which is the one I’m using.
With that out of the way, let’s start with Lilas Ikuta and Ayano Shimizu (stage name ‘ano’), two rookie seiyuu with who voice Dead Dead Demon’s lead female characters Kadode and Ouran (nicknamed ‘Ontan’). Technically, Ikuta has played an anime character before (a supporting player in Mamoru Hosoda’s 2021 film Belle), but the two girls are far more prolific as musicians, extending even to their performance of the series’ excellent
OP and ED. Between the pair, I feel that ano has slipped into her new role more gracefully, which is ironic, since she plays a character with no social graces to speak of. Ontan is often heard speculating about the alien mothership floating above Tokyo, needling her friend Kiho for her everyday interest in boys, and boasting about her vision for the destruction of humanity; without ano’s juvenile, back-of-the-throat delivery to highlight Ontan’s naivete, her transition from page to screen might not have worked as well as it does.
By contrast, Ikuta’s performance doesn’t create the same snug match for her character. Kadode is far more ordinary than her best friend, but she’s still an oddball, and her occasional bursts of energy, while apparent in the show’s animation, aren’t really reflected in her voice. In episode 2, when she invites herself over to her teacher’s apartment with not-so-subtle romantic intentions, she speaks quickly, but without an appropriate level of excitement or nervousness. Ikuta does a little better in episode 4, as Kadode repeatedly attempts to confront a distracted Ontan with the fact of their friend’s death, but while the urgency of her delivery grows over time, it never quite hits an emotional peak before Ontan’s acknowledgment.
The good news is that the inexperience of one of its lead actors is my biggest, and indeed only, strike against the show through four episodes. Everything else has been great, from the transference of Asano’s quirky, sometimes ugly character designs (especially for background characters) to the series’ criticisms of our obsession with electronic media. After the character death I mentioned in previous paragraph, our two protagonists mourn their loss with several of their friends, but in the midst of their tears, there’s a cut to a group of faceless boys gossiping about what happened to that girl in Class 3. Quickly, the conversation shifts to a video game called Evil Dragon Dark Evolution, and how crazy it is that one of them isn’t playing it – much crazier, his friend says, than the death of some girl from their school.
Video games aren’t the only modern vice in Dead Dead Demon’s crosshairs, either (though it’s worth noting that, in this universe, Japan’s premier anti-alien weapon is operated using what looks like a PS2 controller). A jab at otaku culture comes in the form of Japan’s impotent-looking prime minister, who displays idol memorabilia atop a cabinet in his office. There’s also commentary on the iron grip of social media on teenage minds, especially in episode 3, where Kiho goes on a date with Kenichi, her new boyfriend. Kenichi is so fixated on his follower count that he’s off in his own little world during the date, and when Kiho attempts to drag him back to reality, he eventually insults her for being “a sheep.” Granted, her disbelief in the existence of aliens is tied into their disagreement, but the whole thing is kicked off by Kenichi’s inability to be present with his romantic partner due to his preoccupation with SNS.
Interestingly, as the mothership over Tokyo starts to dispatch more and more individual spacecrafts, one of them takes the form of a pair of headphones, matching the pair we see in Kenichi’s profile picture. One episode later, there’s a ship that looks like a Rubik’s Cube – I wasn’t able to connect its appearance to any person or object I’ve seen thus far, but maybe I missed something, or perhaps a link will be established in a future episode. The mystery of the aliens hovering above Japan are a tantalizing part of this show, which is slowly but surely giving us glimpses of non-human entities on Earth, and forming connections between characters. As an example of the latter, in episode 2, Kadode finds a woman’s personal effects in her teacher’s apartment; in episode 3, we learn that a PR agent for a Japanese weapons manufacturer has an unnamed boyfriend; in episode 4, we see the two of them together for the first time.
I’m guessing that Sumaru, the PR woman, is an alien, as it would make sense for them to have someone on the inside of a company producing the weapons that will be used against them. But there’s another character walking the streets of Tokyo whose nonhuman identity doesn’t need to be guessed at: Ooba, a former boy band member who died three years ago on August 31st, when an American missile attack on the alien mothership resulted in the deaths of many Japanese citizens. Despite his passing, however, an alien who looks very much like him is busy breaking into people’s apartments, watching human news broadcasts, and frightening children by using alien technology to construct inverted snowmen. Ooba is a total delight, especially when he speaks with the puppet on his right hand, practicing human conversation by trying out phrases he’s heard on the news (“It’s like, thanks for all your courage!”).
The end of episode 4 serves as a major turning point in Dead Dead Demon’s run, as Ooba speaks with Ontan for the first time, prompting her to flash back to her first encounter with Kadode (nicknamed ‘Demon’) in elementary school. The way the show transitions into the flashback, segmenting the screen into dozens of individual memories and positioning Ontan at their center, signals that her brain has been tampered with. After she’s returned from her trip down memory lane, Ooba flees the scene via a set of helicopter blades extending from his head (the guy just gets weirder and weirder), concluding to himself that Ontan is a Shifter.
“Shifter” may be the broader name for the species of alien that has taken up residence above Japan, or it may refer to a specific subset who have lost their memory and believe themselves to be human. Either way, it’s clear now that this show’s most singular character is more than meets the eye – even before her rooftop encounter with Ooba, though, it wouldn’t have been a reach to draw that conclusion. One early hint at her alien origin is baked into her character design: the jagged line formed by the parting of her hair, similar to the one created when the top half of Ooba’s head swivels off its axis. There’s also her habit of speaking into Object T (a piece of alien tech she discovered near the site of a local crash), perhaps unconsciously communicating with the mothership above in the process.
There are a lot of characters I haven’t covered here, including Kadode’s negligent parents, Ontan’s terminally online brother, and the journalist who visited Sumaru at the start of episode 3. There are visual choices I haven’t mentioned, and sharp edges in the script that I haven’t acknowledged. Still, I’m going to end things here before this post balloons to twice its current length. Next time there won’t be a need for such a lofty intro, so we’ll jump straight into Dead Dead Demon’s approach to the material of its next five episodes. That piece ought to go up after the upcoming 2023 AOTY post has spent a good amount of time at the top of the blog – if you’re enjoying this show as much as I am, I’ll see you then.
