As far as the manga industry is concerned, chainsaw man Creator Tatsuki Fujimoto gets the lion’s share of praise for being one of the manga’s most adventurous creators, crafting tasks such as fire Punch They’re so weird that they feel like they shouldn’t have the kind of descriptive meat you can actually sink your teeth into and chew. But they do. He’s not just a show for show’s sake, and he certainly deserves praise. But one creator who is rarely talked about is Paru Itagaki, best known as the brain behind Netflix. Animal And now Prime Video’s Science Saru anime, Sanda,
It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what’s new in Science Cypress Sanda It’s anime. Murder mystery with horror elements? Sure. Battle Shonen? Probably goes without saying. However, now that we’re halfway through the Prime Video show, the other shoe has dropped on the theme, and from what we’ve already gotten, it’s further proof that Itagaki is truly one of the unspoken masters of making weird manga premises that actually mean something if you take the time to watch her cook and see what she serves up.
But first: what’s Paru Itagaki’s deal?
Anime fans often look to Itagaki’s work as a measuring stick for how weird a manga or anime can be while playing its premise completely straight. As a kind of indirect praise, she is considered a true writer who lets her queer flag fly, mostly because Animal Troubled by the reputation of being “that cute anime” that everyone didn’t get over, like Eri Aster walking out of the theater halfway through Beau is scared Before the other shoe drops. But if you stuck around, you’ll have to watch a master at work.
Somehow, Itagaki squeezed lemons and served lemonade in abundance Animal Moving away from the premise that essentially asked, what if Zootopia Went all the way? Carnivore is “survival of the fittest” privilege, speciesism, and classism (and every other “ism” if you squint) wrapped up in a high school murder mystery drama about the whirlwind romance of a wolf and a rabbit.
And she has done this before also. In fact, fellow female mangakas have been releasing formative banger after banger with works like Rumiko Takahashi Ranma 1/2, Urusei YatsuraAnd InuyashaItagaki has consistently created out-of-the-box, introspective works under bizarre premises that would otherwise scare off the common reader. In his other manga, such as ushimitsu Gao, she asked, “What if adultery through ghost possession was a romance story?” or “What if pets were transformed into humans to solve the declining birth rate crisis?” In cause of taikaItagaki knows what he is about, and considers his father to be Keisuke Itagaki bucky the grappler Boy—it makes sense that she would go the other way with her collective ability to create works of beauty and hideousness in equal measure. He sees the human body as an enemy in martial arts; He is an enigma about the human soul.
Now: Sanda And how Itagaki gift-wrapped a touchy subject in a wacky package
Which ultimately brings us here SandaRecently adapted by Science Cypress (K) day and day fame). At first, the anime felt like a waiting game, with viewers curious to see when the other shoe would drop, and Itagaki’s work would give fans a glimpse of the present he was hiding in his latest strange gospel. Its premise, in which a boy named Sanda Kazushige turns into Santa Claus whenever he touches something red and attends a school in a post-apocalyptic world with a low birth rate and very few adults, was umm. Her classmate, Shiori, was ah, not ready to spend Christmas with her missing classmate, Ichi Ono (maybe romantically, maybe not). With episode 5, the shoe slipped.
What’s revealed is something weirder and darker than the admittedly strange week-to-week revelations of its first episode: a world where children aren’t allowed to sleep because sleep triggers puberty. And youth is dangerous. The school’s headmaster, Hifumi Oshibu – a 92-year-old plastic-surgery-obsessed cyborg – cherishes the ephemeral aesthetics of youth like a trophy. The oxytocin released from his body heals his surgical wounds, and he even has his heart preserved in a jar. Subtext is for cowards!
Yet, despite all his surgeries, even having his eyes replaced with circuitry, he’s still the kind of guy who proves you can fake everything but his hands have become withered raisins with age. Oishibu will make every effort to impose his common sense on the students, even going so far as to assemble a private militia to maintain the secrets surrounding sleep. This is why Ono, the missing schoolgirl who returned alive after all, reveals that she ran away because she had just reached puberty while sleeping next to her partner Shiori, and woke up from a dream of a sapphic awakening. If Oshibu would go so far as to protect children who murder adults by not treating them as a violation of the law, there is no telling how far his brand of authority will go to punish a child for dreaming and, in turn, growing up on his premises.
School serves as a detention center, a terrarium that literally helicopters parents over their children, trying to protect them from the messy chemical changes that come with growing up and, in its safety, preventing their children’s hearts and minds from taking the next step toward adulthood that their hormonal inclinations are propelling them to. Meanwhile, for Sanda – who as a child is going through her own hormonal confusion that can turn her into an incurable adult – the only way to help her classmates fulfill their dreams is to become as strong as Santa, something she can only do if her classmates can sleep and dream of this mythical, mysterious hero figure. And that’s not even paying attention to the love triangle between him, Shiori, and Ono. It’s a tug-of-war between a society obsessed with preserving childhood and children desperate to grow up.
Herein lies the real story beneath Itagaki’s latest anime Iceberg. Sanda This isn’t just a weird fight to shine with a Santa gimmick at the holiday season. It’s about the perversion of innocence, the commodification of wonder, and the strange, liminal space between childhood and adulthood. How your heart and hands age at different speeds than the rest of you, and how teenagers who say and do the most despicable things attempt to push back against systems that only want them to remain precious flowers trapped in amber.
And science with cypress, who cut his teeth devilman crybaby, The night is short, let’s go girlAnd Keep your hands off Eizouken!, You get the perfect studio to bring that brand of awkward honesty, surreal heartache, side-busting physical comedy and explosive action to life.
Granted, we’re just over the halfway point of the season, and Sanda Yet the rug can be pulled in any direction, making this chair controversial with its nesting doll theme. But for now, the series has all the makings of a show equipped with the Paru Itagaki effect. It’s a story about the cost of growing up, the fear of letting go, and the systems that try to freeze children at times. The fact that a kid can make Shazam into Santa is almost helpful. If you stick with its strangeness long enough, you’ll find a diamond where you might otherwise have seen only coal.
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