Dandadan Is the Thing With Feathers: Unbridled Optimism for Weird Times

When news of another extraordinary discovery made by the James Webb telescope went viral a couple of weeks ago, suggesting that confirmation of extraterrestrial life is closer than ever, my reaction was unexpected. I’m not a skeptic; on the contrary. Most spec fic fans—regardless of their thoughts on conspiracies—readily acknowledge that the universe is incomprehensibly huge. To assume mankind is alone in it? That’s the pinnacle arrogance. We are of Trekkie stock.

But when my friend Bridget (of Anime Grab Bag acclaim) sent me an article on the subject, my primary response was weird, vicarious delight. “Oh man, Okarun is gonna scream ‘I told you so!’” 

Okarun is a mutual friend. He’s a big fan of aliens and cryptids. He carries a stack of occult magazines wherever he goes. I can easily imagine the moment Bridget sends this article to Okarun: His jubilation is palpable. The illuminated newsprint reflects on his oversized glasses, and he leaps from his desk in excitement, because he’s a real dork and, like many a 15-year-old, his fixations are what keep him afloat.

I sent Bridget a picture of our buddy:

So maybe Okarun is not a real person. But he may as well be, given how much his well-being has been on my mind of late. He, and Momo, and Aira, and Jiji, and Turbo Granny, and Momo’s grandma, and Momo’s charming gyaru friends at school, and the ghost of a former ballet dancer, and an alien mantis shrimp boxer? Getting to know these dorks over the past few weekends has been a real comfort. Bridget and I savored every minute of the first season of Dandadan.

I am going to struggle writing this one, in the same way Okarun might struggle to stop ranting about Skinwalker Ranch. This show has become an instant, irrevocable obsession. Who could possibly be concise when falling in love?

Still, what a thing to fall for… This is a batshit show about an otaku boy who accidentally exchanges his genitals for paranormal powers when confronted by a duplicitous old ghost named Turbo Granny. It’s also about a rebellious girl who gets abducted by perverted aliens that accidentally awaken her repressed telekinetic powers just in time for her to kick their asses. But most of all, it’s about the evocative friendship that sprouts between these two odd ducks as they navigate not just otherworldly menaces, but also the various social perils of high school. 

It sounds like a lot, but Dandadan is close to perfect. 

For all the glorious animation from Science Saru, the studio co-founded by none other than Masaki Yuasa of The Tatami Galaxy and Devilman Crybaby acclaim, for all that debut director Fuuga Yamashiro proves himself a legend in the making with every frame of this show, for all that the OP and ED slap, and the soundtrack from composer Kensuke Ushio is at least as stellar as his work on Chainsaw Man, for all that the story is creative and the monsters bizarre and the comedy hits so many marks…

…even with all of that in the mix, the brightest element of Dandadan is its eccentric, lovable cast. For this, mangaka Yukinobu Tobu must be credited more than anyone. Tobu famously worked as an assistant on both Chainsaw Man and Hell’s Paradise, among the most fantastic and ambitious series in recent years. But much as I adore those series, too (especially the former), Dandadan’s goofy kids and kooks embody something those other series lack: the unbridled. uncanny optimism of youth.

So often, shonen anime characters are defined by what they’ve lost. Naruto lacks a family, and Gon’s got an absent father, and Denji loses even his human heart in the Chainsaw Man pilot. Of course, the characters in Dandadan have lost things as well. Momo was raised by her grandmother, and Okarun pointedly avoids discussing his home life. Aira’s mother died, and Jiji’s parents have been hospitalized. But these losses are never their defining features. 

Instead, characters in Dandadan are defined by the things they love.

Conviction vs. Confidence

Okarun’s entire identity revolves around his niche obsessions. This kid may not have friends, but he does have UFOs and UMAs. His commitment to all things alien is probably neurodivergent and Okarun uses his passions as a social crutch—when things get awkward for him, it’s probably time to start yelling about Area 51. Okarun, who is often bullied, has long since accepted that he is fundamentally uncool. 

He is wrong. It is cool to care about things. Okarun shouts, “Look at this picture of Mothman!” with the same conviction that he looks a person straight in the eyes and says, “I am sorry for being weak; next time I will protect you.” He is unfailingly, beautifully earnest at all times.

After Okarun gains transformative ghostly abilities, his speedy alter ego becomes more outspoken but maintains his flair for melodrama. “I’m so depressed,” he says, sotto voce. “Yare yare.” But even when he seems disaffected, his compassionate core remains intact. He will run, and run, and keep running, if that’s going to help someone out. It’s part desperation, but it’s mostly conviction. 

Momo’s passions are harder to pin down, but she harbors a deep love for her family. She believes in ghosts not because she has seen them, but because she believes in her grandmother, who is an exorcist. She is simultaneously a skeptic and a romantic, a defiant kid more preoccupied with people than school. Momo is so clearly uninterested in impressing anybody; as a consequence, hers is the kind of popularity that inspires some nasty rumors. But as confident as Momo seems in both bearing and action, she questions all of her feelings, inwardly unsure. 

A character like Momo could have been written as a Mean Girl, but any hint of that is quashed from the get-go. In the pilot, Momo’s in a mood because she’s just broken up with her skeezy boyfriend. She takes out her annoyance by deterring a few of Okarun’s bullies. Maybe defending Okarun was incidental, or maybe it wasn’t. But the takeaway is this: Momo defends others by default. 

Okarun sees this interaction as a rare chance to make a human connection. He chases after her with his conspiracy rag in tow, ranting about Nessie and space wars. This is more than Momo bargained for, and she shouts, “This is why you don’t have any friends!” 

It’s gutting, but Momo makes it only five steps from him before stopping, turning to face him, and apologizing. At heart, she is her grandmother’s kid, with a tough-as-nails exterior that barely encases a marshmallow heart. She may be rude, brazen, and bold. But she can’t bring herself to be cruel.

At times, the interactions between Okarun and Momo remind me, bizarrely, of the better films by John Hughes. But the roles they play are switched. Okarun is the shy girl who gets the makeover but remains essentially himself, his eyes as big as the world once you get past his glasses. Momo, on the other hand, is the bad boy in town, fronting at times but harboring a hero’s heart. There’s some subtle, lovely gender fuckery happening here.

These two kids inspire something like cute-aggression in me, because it is so damn delightful to know they’ve found each other. And they’re just two characters of many.

Dandadan imbues even the smallest of roles with breathtaking verisimilitude. That includes classmates and family members and childhood friends and, yes, all the monsters, too. 

We need to talk about episode seven.

 A Kinder World

One of anime’s greatest strengths is its tendency to humanize all things inhuman. I have written an entire essay on a single episode of Mushishi. I will never stop singing the praises of the humanity of the ghosts in Natsume Yuujinchou and the sympathetic monsters of Ghibli. Japanese culture as a whole takes a masterful approach to personification, ascribing human attributes to everything from old umbrellas to towers to a condom (a Yokohama city mascot).

Even so, I wasn’t expecting the wallop of emotions that episode seven, “To a Kinder World,” delivers. In episode six, we are introduced to Acrobatic Silky, a creepy monster-of-the-week who appears as a demented ballet dancer in a pink dress. She weaponizes her feet and her hair and claims that Aira, a classmate of our heroes, is her daughter. When her affections are rejected, Silky swallows all three kids whole.

Momo gets them out of her stomach and then Okarun deals Acrobatic Silky a finishing blow. Unfortunately, Aira doesn’t have any powers and being swallowed by a weird, weeping ghost is bad for the health. Okarun and Momo try hard to resuscitate Aira, and the shattered remains of Acrobatic Silky approach. She doesn’t want to fight; she wants to save Aira. Momo agrees to use her psychic abilities to combine their auras…when she does so, Acrobatic Silky’s memories overwhelm her mind.

Over the next ten minutes, the audience is treated to a wordless, stunning montage comparable to Pixar’s finest moment in the opening scenes of Up. Acrobatic Silky’s origin story unfolds as a ballet, scored by a brilliant, piano-led orchestral composition from Ken Ushio called “Reaching the Stars.” We watch a struggling mother wake up alone in a love hotel, scrape cash from the nightstand, and stagger home. There she is greeted by her beaming little girl. We watch life return to her features as her daughter embraces her. We watch her go to work as a janitor, and as a conbini clerk, and again as a sex worker. But always she returns home and holds her daughter, eats curry and rice with her, teaches her to dance. The woman who died and became Acrobatic Silky once imagined herself living a very different life. Or, at the very least, she dreamed of a different life for her daughter. 

I don’t want to say more. Suffice it to say this episode, which I assumed would be a throwaway bridge between larger story arcs, left me in tears. 

If Acrobatic Silky were a villain in almost any other show, maybe we would never have seen her origin story. Or, if we had, there is no possible way it would have been conveyed with so much grace and emotion. This is art, pure and simple.

The humanity of Acrobatic Silky is a rule, not an exception. An anatomical model flees the high school biology lab not to haunt anyone, but to rescue his beloved, an outdated female anatomical model called Hana, from the garbage dump. And Turbo Granny, for all her villainy at the outset, long made it her ghostly missions to look after the spirits of murdered girls.

The fictional, inaka-adjacent setting of Kamigoe City is essential here. As a current denizen of Tottori, the birthplace of many a yokai, I know how unsettling cicada-drenched backwoods, overgrown train stations, and semi-abandoned onsen towns can be. Japan, despite its famed metropolises, is a land of echoes. Much of the countryside feels haunted, held together by communities aging out of the world. Out here, ghosts are basically family.

Okarun theorizes that the ghosts and monsters of Earth may be its defenders. Aliens can’t possibly invade with our own beasties protecting their home. But even if that’s true, Dandadan still rejects any purely Us vs. Them narrative when it comes to aliens and yokai. An alien working part-time for the villains is doing so only to provide medical care for his son in another galaxy. 

The message is clear: Being monstrous does not preclude anyone from being a decent person.

A Potential Elephant in the Room

Having sung so much praise for Dandadan, I should note that there is an aspect of the show that has caused some controversy and been the source of significant discourse on online forums. There has been fair criticism that Dandadan has taken a poorly considered approach to the subject of sexual assault. I can entirely understand this viewpoint. Please consider this a content warning for this section, if you would prefer to avoid a discussion of the show’s attitudes and depiction of sexuality, sexual assault, and consent.

I am not the type to dismiss anyone’s discomfort. I agree that in episode one, seeing Momo get abducted by creepy aliens, strapped to a chair in her underwear, and threatened with a phallus is unsettling. In many stories of alien abduction, the most terrifying aspect is often the sexual assault element—while at the same time, it’s so often mined as a source of humor; I feel that my exposure to comedy as a kid included a thousand different references to anal probes; the way people deal with feelings of anxiety and horror is often messy and contradictory. My prior comparison of Dandadan with John Hughes movies feels relevant here, though not in a complimentary way: Dandadan is a coming-of-age show, with all the complex, potentially traumatic encounters that come with developing into an adult.

I am not saying this isn’t fucked up. Becoming a teen girl is fundamentally a fucked-up experience, regardless of whether aliens are involved. I remember how awful it felt as a teen to suddenly be aware that people were viewing me as a sexual object. When I was fourteen, a male doctor told my mother that I had good, child-bearing hips. He laughed when I, surprised by the question of whether I might be pregnant, told him I was just a kid. “A lot of kids your age are having sex, you know.” The implication was there—I was the ridiculous one for still thinking I was a kid.  When I was Momo’s age, a man leered at me at the supermarket and told me he liked his women tall (I could never, ever hunch my shoulders enough, I guess). At school, I was grateful not to be on the girls’ soccer team, because my best friend told me that it was a standard hazing ritual for an older girl to pin them down, shove her hand up their shorts, and squeeze.

Was any of this okay? Absolutely not. But was it my experience? Yes.

It’s no secret that Japan has a troubling history when it comes to issues of autonomy and consent. When I lived near Tokyo, I learned the word “chikan” early on, just in case I needed to shout it when being groped on a train. Japanese society is only now showing signs of finally pushing past outdated notions of the roles men and women should play in life, but it’s slow going (look at any news on the gender pay gap). However early the seeds of those roles are planted, they really become enforced when kids enter puberty. In anime, teens are all too fetishized: Girls are reduced to jiggly breasts and boys are drawn like freaking bodybuilders (I can’t get into Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure because I am supposed to believe this guy is a high schooler). The list of shows that mishandle topics of sexuality is longer than the list of those that don’t.

So why am I defending Dandadan? For one thing, Dandadan is a show about scary things. If monsters can be people, people can also be monsters. Which is worse—the alien assholes who want to probe all these kids, or the shitty classmates who want to get close to Momo the moment they hear the rumor that she’ll open her legs for anyone? They’re all villains, but one type is more likely to be encountered in real life.

As teens, we begin to dissociate from our bodies because they no longer feel like ours. For Momo, it’s the notion that her value is based on her physical attributes. For Okarun, at an age when boys are deeply insecure about their penises, he is constantly being literally emasculated by monsters. All genders have reason to believe that their bodies are wrong, wrong, wrong. Teens are uncoordinated, targeted, and as a rule, bodies mature years before the mind can catch up.

I speak only for myself here, and not for Reactor or anyone else, when I say that Dandadan is a story about boundaries and respect. Okarun and Momo become friends because they can go through traumatic events buck naked and never sexualize each other. They see each other as people first, bodies second. The recurring joke of Okarun losing his dick works only because losing his dick never makes him less of a guy. At no point does Momo think less of him for lacking what society tells him he should have. And when assholes in class make comments on Momo’s promiscuity, Okarun shuts them right up. In a world of indecent things, these two treat each other with endless decency. 

I trusted that Dandadan would not cross the line between commentary on a problem and becoming the problem. Was this trust misplaced? I haven’t read the manga, but so far, when it comes to the anime, I don’t think so. I do, however, absolutely agree that Science SARU chose a really poor spot to place their cliffhanger ending, given Momo’s circumstances.

All of this to say: raised eyebrows are fair, here, and so of course are criticism and discussion. But I do hope that anyone who encounters the discourse about this aspect of the series before watching the show will not be deterred from giving it a chance and deciding for themselves.

Optimism, Unrelenting

Dandadan should be hard to stomach, given how many disastrous elements it juggles.

But all this is getting me very close to the single point that makes this show feel virtually unparalleled: These kids feel like actual teens. They are drawn like half-baked individuals, with proportions and postures reminiscent of all my awkward high school hunching days. They express themselves directly but inconveniently. Momo and Okarun and friends are really just trying to figure the world out. All the absurdity works because growing up is fundamentally an absurd experience.

Being bullied for your interests is hardly weirder than boiling a crab monster in an onsen or accusing a cryptid of cheating at sumo. In high school, every situation is potentially disastrous. Mistaking a fight for a romantic fling, using the wrong farewell when saying goodbye? Well, these things are only a little less mortifying than having to fight a monstrous, alien-tech modded Loch Ness Monster while wearing nothing but your underwear. 

Maybe Dandadan is a mess. But only in the way that, say, an art studio is a mess, or a paella is a mess, or a motherboard is a mess to untrained eyes like mine. It is only a mess so much as growing up is a mess. 

In summation—because I would rather go rewatch the whole show than trumpet its virtues forever—Dandadan has arthouse directorial chops, flawless animation, style a fashion house would envy, and comedy worthy of Gintama. It’s as bombastic as FLCL but far more conscientious; it features a burgeoning romance worthy of Toradora!; its soundtrack is effervescent and tongue-in-cheek (and not just because a boxing shrimp alien sings ABBA’s “Chiquitita” to pump himself up). 

And the animation? With every episode, Bridget and I waited, even dreaded, the inevitable drop in quality that plagues even the best anime. But if we were on the dancefloor waiting for that drop, we’d be stuck in the buildup in perpetuity. It. Never. Came. 

Dandadan offers its audience something very akin to, well… hope.

Its best moments are the quiet ones. Okarun telling Momo, as they are under attack and floating in an alternate version of a high school hallway, that he never wants them to misunderstand each other. Momo waiting for him at the school gates, and Okarun refusing to believe she could be, because no one has ever waited for him before. These two idiots, in classic romcom fashion, spending an entire lunch period looking for each other and missing each other at every turn. Momo’s grandmother holding her tight and asking her not to die before sending her off to face an ancient ghost.

So bring on the cryptids, bring on the comedy, bring on the dick jokes, bring on the regrets and the misunderstandings and most of all, bring on the friendship. There are teens like these two all over the world. As a teacher, I know it. For every turd of a human we encounter, there’s some earnest young geek out there looking to shake things up.

I understand not wanting to feel much these days. I relate to people who have shut down in the face of the news. But there’s some solace to be found in fiction like this, in stories that successfully equate fighting for all of humanity with dropping a bucket on a bully’s head. When you’re fifteen, everything is a big deal, and so nothing is. Everything awful in the world has to be, somehow, manageable.

Or, if it isn’t? Well. Yare yare.[end-mark]

The post <i>Dandadan</i> Is the Thing With Feathers: Unbridled Optimism for Weird Times appeared first on Reactor.

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