If you’re just thinking “should I watch DanDaDan“, here’s my honest review: yes. Absolutely. The DanDaDan anime and DanDaDan manga are both fantastic, if you have a taste for bizarre sci-fi action and moderate perversion.
How did I start watching DanDaDan?
I was looking for new anime to watch, and this was it. This sci-fi comedy anime was heralded as the best new anime of 2024, due to its chaotic energy, fantastic animation and premise that mashes up aliens, ghosts, demons, and comedy into one bizarre package. It’s on Crunchyroll and Netflix, so, why not?
The opening sequence is a trip. Set to Otonoke, by Creepy Nuts (who also performed meme-worthy hit Bling-bang-bang-born from Mashle), it’s a mind rending sensory overload of quick cuts and saturated colors. It lets you know, “hey kid, buckle up, this might get a bit weird“. And weird it gets.
A tale as old as time
DanDaDan is a manga series, ongoing since 2021, written and drawn by Yukinobu Tatsu. As of right now, it’s been collected in 19 volumes. The anime debuted in 2024, with a second season coming in July 2025.
There’s nothing super unusual about it. On the surface, it’s your typical nerdy boy crushes on trendy girl story. You know, your run of the mill story where the boy (Okarun) believes in aliens, and the girl (Momo) believes in ghosts, and they’re both absolutely right. The trite cliche where one night they dare each other to face their fears and a demon steals the boy’s genitals and aliens kidnap and assault the girl on their spaceship, unlocking her latent psychic powers and then the boy is possessed by the demon and fights off the aliens and only the girl can keep the demon at bay. It’s a tale as old as time.
But is it good?
I’ll be honest, at first I didn’t love the first episode. It’s kinda bizarre, and kinda pervy (Japan is a different culture, man). Also, I think a lot of it hinged on knowing who Takakura Ken (the real actor who the main character shares a name with) is, and I didn’t. So, some of the jokes and initial premise went over my head.
You see, Momo has a crush on Takakura Ken, the actor. So she ends up dating guys who look like him, but treat her poorly. When she meets our main character, also named Takakura Ken, she doesn’t think much of him. But as she gets to know him, she figures out that while he doesn’t look like the actor, he behaves like him, and that’s much more appealing to her. This kind of humor might be a barrier for some viewers at first, but it rewards you for sticking with it. This is a joke that pays off several times throughout the course of the series.
So, I stuck with it, and as the series progressed, it just got weirder and weirder. But it also grew a heart. It only takes seven episodes to deliver an emotional gut punch of an episode that it absolutely earns. Yukinobu Tatsu does a fantastic job of telling a dark, emotional story, wasting no frames on unnecessary fluff.
That episode, which told the backstory of Acrobatic Silky, inspired me to read the manga. I fell deep into the DanDaDan rabbit hole, binging it all in a couple of days. Honestly, I don’t remember most of what happened, but I can say this with 100% certainty: Shit gets so weird. Like. SO weird. In the best possible way. Weird enough that the opening episode feels almost quaint at this point.
Anyway, as the story progresses, they fight new demons, gain new allies, explore new worlds, fight new aliens, find and lose testicles, all pretty standard stuff. The anime does a great job of capturing the trippy vibe of the manga, but the manga just does it better. The demons, the monsters, the other dimensions, just feel amazing in Tatsu’s black and white linework. This isn’t to criticize the anime, but to praise the manga. It’s worth checking out.
Where the anime does really shine, though, is the comedy. The comedy plays much better on the screen than the page, at least for me, even if I do sometimes need to google who someone is to understand the joke. I’m looking forward to the second season in 2025, and think it might be my most recommended contemporary anime. Having read the manga, I guarantee the second season is going to be wild.
The real reason I love DanDaDan
Writing these posts has really shown me that I do love a certain type of story. While I love absorbing the bizarre stories and laughing at the inscrutable humor, underneath it all, DanDaDan cares about its characters. It’s about the loner outcast who makes a friend, and then another, and then another, until they are an unstoppable band of warriors saving the universe. It gives me hope that maybe one day I will also find my tribe.
I don’t need to become unstoppable, or save the universe, but it might be fun to be able to make a friend or two.
So long as it’s not a FBI agent.