Before I first watched Devilman Crybaby, I had been warned: “Isn’t that the gross pervy one?”
Sort of. Devilman Crybaby’s reputation precedes it. While leering fan service shots are commonplace in a great deal of anime, Devilman Crybaby exceeds that. The show readily depicts full frontal nudity and sex, to the point where you start to ask yourself: Isn’t this a little excessive? And yet, the themes of the show are complex, raw, and emotionally powerful. Devilman Crybaby’s usage of the human body is disturbing, perverted, and disgusting—and that is entirely the point.
Body horror and pornography have something in common: their usage of the human body to evoke emotion. Body horror brings out our disgust and fear. It is empathetic and introspective. It threatens your sense of comfort, and perhaps even your sense of mortality. Pornography, on the other hand, shifts its gaze outwards. It is objectifying. It sees the human body as the vessel for pleasure. If body horror repels, pornography attracts. It pulls your attention into it whether for the sake of titillation or just scandalization.
Both genres draw from us the same extreme emotions: anxiety, arousal, disgust. The key to the provocativeness is our hyperawareness of our own bodies. Devilman Crybaby brings pornography and body horror uncomfortably close together. This choice is intentional. It is meant to make us uncomfortable, and it is meant to say something about humanity. With the new awareness of our bodies, are we also aware of the difference between our bodies and our souls?
Devilman Crybaby follows our main character, Akira Fudo, a high school student whose empathy gets him labeled as a crybaby. His character foil is Ryo Asuka, an icy blonde child genius, and Akira’s childhood friend. The plot kicks off when Ryo suddenly picks up Akira from a confrontation and quickly explains to him that demons (the ones from the Bible) are a very real threat to humanity, whose existence Ryo wants to expose to the world. Ryo plans to capture video evidence of one at a debauched sex party called a Sabbath. At this party, Akira’s body becomes possessed by a devil called Amon. Akira becomes half devil and half man, and thus is physically stronger than any human could be. With Akira’s newfound powers, the duo begin their mission to stop the demons from terrorizing the world by enacting mass murder against the demons.
To look at what Devilman Crybaby has to say about the separation of our bodies from our souls, it’s easy to look at the montage following our duo entering the Sabbath party. They’re met with a shocking sight: Neon breasts, bottoms, and any number of provocative images are flashed on the screen as the audience sees clips of the partygoers participating in sex acts.
Like Akira, the viewer is meant to become flustered at this pornographic imagery. The degeneracy of this party, however, is not enough to summon the demons. Ryo decides to crank the party up a notch, and begins violently stabbing partygoers. In the midst of the blood and chaos, the demons finally start appearing. It is in the following scenes that the effectiveness of Devilman Crybaby’s experimental usage of body horror starts to take shape. Images of nude women, which were meant to appear sensual, soon morph into being horrific as breasts are stretched into monstrous, mouth-like appendages, and bodies are crunched, stretched, and ripped until they barely resemble humans anymore.
The nudity present in the scene heightens the horror of the unwitting transformation of the human party attendees into inhuman demons. Their transformation from titillating to horrifying forces the audience’s perspective to shift from a voyeuristic observation of the bodies of others to a self–aware, introspective visualization of pain enacted upon the self. The object of desire is painfully transformed into a wretched monster.
Yes, the nudity in Devilman Crybaby is self–indulgent. The violence is, too. In a story that explores sin and the suffering of being alive, the indulgence into extremes is crucial to exploring the rawness of the dark side of the human experience. Is having a body key to what it means to be human?
In a scene where Akira is running for his life from the demon Amon, we hear Ryo’s voice asking a question: "Why do you run?” Ryo explains that human beings, compared to animals, are incredibly weak — that our bodies are not capable of extreme physical feats, not even enough to help us survive. If you were to run from a ravenous coyote for your life, no matter how fast you can run, you will not outrun the coyote. So then, why bother training at something like running, when your accomplishments will be meaningless anyway? Akira’s body transforms into that of a demon, and yet he still retains his human heart.
The characters possessed by demons in the show act like humans, their goals and dreams, the same as before their physical transformations. And yet their bodies are faster and stronger than any human being’s could be. Perhaps the soul exists separately from the body. That despite the body’s weakness, the soul’s strength is immeasurable.
To pervert the human form in this way, it makes you aware of the proximity pleasure has to pain. It shifts the object into the subject as you observe people in their most vulnerable state be transformed and brutalized. And yet some characters still retain their humanity despite the escalating barbarity of the events of the show. Shame, perversion, anxiety, and horror are uncomfortable aspects of being alive, but they are real nonetheless.
The degeneracy of Devilman Crybaby is intentional. Every carefully animated shot of sex or strange bodily transformations and gore is meant to make your skin crawl. Yes, it is weird and uncomfortable and if your mom walked in you would have a lot to explain to her. But isn’t life weird and uncomfortable? The primal reactions to the sight of sex and gore remind us that we are still animals, and yet the show tells us that despite this, our human spirit can persevere.
