Anime Meta-Review
Devilman: Amon, Apocalypse of Devilman
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Title Info
- type: movie
- grade: burnable
- Other elements of this title:
- This title should offend everyone.
- people: Go-Nagai
- source: asian
- made: unknown
- Review created: Recently, but I didn't record the date.
- mod: none
I didn't expect much from a Go Nagai creation, but I certainly didn't expect anything quite this horrible. My burnable category exists for stuff that can destroy a developing interest in anime. This movie almost destroyed my interest in anime. The story, as much as it exists, is in a future after the events of the devilman OAV. Demons have come back to reclaim the world, and mankinds best response is to revert to anarchy and randomly kill people in the hope they might be demons. In this nightmarish world Akira Fudo, who has contained a demon within himself, must again fight for control after tragic events unbalance him. In the end it is his human memories that enable him to survive and remain human.
At least that's probably what they wanted to do, but you'd be hard put to find it in the shambling wreckage of this movie. The writing is woefully unsubtle (and illogical) leading to an almost complete lack of atmosphere. Since they don't appear to be able to do character or dialog work either all that is left are acts of unspeakably cruel violence and a bit of monster biffo (with required buckets of blood). Indeed Akira's struggle with his inner demon actually means simply another monster bash. And I won't describe the intentionally nasty violence in this piece, but if you find it enjoyable or worthy in any way then seek professional help. This one is just ugly. And, what is worse, it's nasty without atmosphere or story point...as if to say, hey, look what we can do to these characters. And then the pointless and woeful conclusion. Gack, at least this probably means the devilman saga has spluttered to it's deserved end, as a cheap video nasty.
The production values look better than it deserves. But then, it doesn't deserve a bunch of crayon drawings. The animation is bright and clear. In fact it is too bright and simple, leading to a feeling of low detail and a lack of visual atmosphere. It is almost completely bereft of style. The design work is reasonable for the main characters, but fades quickly for everyone else. The action and scenes are woefully unsubtle, and the combat action (barring a precious few moments) has all the subtlety of american wrestling. I don't know where the source for this tape was, I suspect an asian bootleg, but the translation was awe inspiringly bad... not that I minded for this material, because there ain't that much dialogue, and it's as subtle as a crossbow bolt through your kid brothers head....golly, spoiled it for you.
I honestly hope that none of my regular sources attempts to review this anime.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:17 WST 2009