Dandadan Review: The Most Unhinged Anime of Its Year (Complimentary)

Story & Premise

The setup is a dare that goes catastrophically right. Momo Ayase, a sharp-tongued gyaru from a bloodline of spirit mediums, believes in ghosts but laughs off aliens. Her scrawny, occult-obsessed classmate — whom she promptly nicknames Okarun after saving him from bullies — believes in aliens but rolls his eyes at ghosts. To prove each other wrong, they split up: she stakes out an alien hotspot at a derelict hospital, he ventures into a tunnel with a nasty haunted reputation. Both are catastrophically correct. Momo is snatched by little grey visitors; Okarun runs afoul of Turbo Granny, a vengeful yokai who curses him and steals something a teenage boy would very much like back. Momo's latent psychic power erupts to save them, and the two are welded together for the wild ride ahead. From there it becomes a breathless monster-of-the-week gauntlet — new spook, new alien, new escalation almost every stretch — stitched to a slow-burn romance neither of them will admit to. It should be a mess. Instead the momentum never lets up.

Characters

The romance is the reactor core, and it works because Momo and Okarun are specific, not archetypes. Momo is loud, brave, and fiercely loyal — a gyaru who will throw hands with an eldritch horror to protect a boy she insists she does not like. Okarun is twitchy, sweet, and quietly courageous, the kind of nerd who finally has something worth being brave for. Their dynamic dodges the usual will-they-won't-they staleness: these two obviously adore each other, and the tension comes from teenage embarrassment rather than manufactured misunderstanding. It is genuinely charming. Around them, the show keeps introducing scene-stealers — Aira Shiratori, a self-styled psychic who crashes in as a rival and slowly gets folded into the group, and Seiko, Momo's outrageous medium grandmother who steals every frame she occupies. Even the monsters graduate into cast members; the once-terrifying Turbo Granny becomes an unexpectedly delightful sidekick. It is an ensemble that grows warmer as the roster swells, and Momo is the sun the whole thing orbits.

Animation & Sound

This is where Science Saru turns the dial to eleven. The studio's house style — fluid, rubbery, unafraid to warp anatomy for a gag or a scare — is a perfect match for material this deranged, and the adaptation exploits it constantly. Faces distend into grotesque masks, backgrounds smear into psychedelic color fields, and the camera lunges through fights with a manic, handheld urgency. Naoyuki Onda's character designs keep the human cast expressive and grounded so the surrounding chaos hits harder, while the monster and alien designs lean unsettling and strange. Action staging is a genuine highlight: kinetic, weighty, and legible even at full sprint, with the occasional shift into stylized flourishes that feel like the animators showing off — and earning it. The opening sequence is an instant-classic hit of pure momentum, the kind you refuse to skip. Sound design under Eriko Kimura sells every squelch, thud, and psychic shockwave, and the score knows exactly when to drop out and let a quiet, aching beat breathe. It is a technical showcase with a sense of humor.

Themes & What Sets It Apart

Strip away the aliens and exorcisms and Dandadan is a startlingly sincere story about being sixteen: the terror of liking someone, the armor we wear to hide it, the search for people who feel like home. That is the trick the whole show is built on. The supernatural mayhem is a vehicle for very human feeling, and the series keeps pivoting from slapstick to genuine tenderness — sometimes inside a single scene — without the gearshift grinding. It is also braver than its goofball reputation suggests. Underneath the gags, it reaches for real darkness: grief, abandonment, and the ugliness people inflict on the vulnerable, handled with more care than a crude comedy has any right to muster. What sets it apart is that range. Plenty of anime do action, or comedy, or romance, or horror; Dandadan does all of them at once and refuses to let any single mode dominate. It is a genre blender that somehow produces a coherent, personal flavor — the rare show whose maximalism is a feature, not a symptom of not knowing what it wants to be.

Strengths & Shortcomings

What soars: the momentum, the animation, the humor, and that sneaky emotional core. When Dandadan is firing, few shows are more fun. But the honesty this earns cuts both ways. The crude comedy is relentless, and the very first hook hangs on a lewd gag that will be a hard nope for plenty of viewers; if lowbrow, below-the-belt humor makes you wince, the opening stretch is a minefield. The tonal whiplash is also a genuine risk: the show swerves from broad slapstick to disturbing subject matter — including sexual violence played uncomfortably close to comedy — and not every viewer will feel that landing was earned. The sheer, unrelenting intensity can be exhausting too; this is a series with almost no downshift, and marathoning it can leave you wrung out. And structurally, it is pure setup — a single cour that ends as a launchpad, not a destination, so anyone hoping for a self-contained arc should temper expectations. None of this sinks it, but they are real reasons a curious newcomer might bounce off hard.

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