Let’s get freaky.
So, DanDaDan is a case where I’m familiar with the source material. I may or may not be ahead of anywhere the show gets, we’ll see just how far they push this season in terms of volumes; since there’s a fair amount of action in the material, it can be quite variable on how long a show needs versus how many pages a manga needs.
The general premise is… well, it’s what goes on in the first episode here. We meet two high-school kids with their own problems. Momo Ayase is a pretty girl with a celebrity-crush on actor Ken Takakura, who starts the show by getting dumped by a jerk of a guy who just happened to look the part a little bit. While she’s sulking, she decides to go a good deed for a boy (who we will usually call “Okarun”, short for “Occult-kun”) who was in the process of being bullied.
Okarun finds Momo shortly after, assuming that she, like he, is an aficionado of the supernatural. Momo blows him off, but softens when she realizes that words do hurt, revealing that while she’s not into all this UFO crud, she does believe in ghost. Okarun turns the tables on her, since he doesn’t believe in ghosts, and they get into a bit of a verbal spar that ends with a double dare: Each will visit the other’s brand of supernatural happening spot to see if they have an encounter, proving who was right.
Turns out, they’re both right – Okarun encounters a haunt known as Turbo-granny, while Momo is abducted by a group of aliens that see human women as an out from their current “male clones only” problem.
As both have these encounters, Okarun ends up possessed but answers Momo’s distress by utilizing ghosty powers to manifest through the phone connection between them and start fighting aliens. He’s subdued, but the alien mind probing and the teachings of Momo’s spirit medium grandma allow her to awaken some fairly impressive psychic powers, finishing the fight. This leads the two of them ejected from a crashed saucer onto a lonely highway, one set of clothing to their collective names and Okarun cursed by the Turbo-granny, who holds his (to use a different euphamism) banana hostage for a rematch.
As they stalk off, both full believers and considering what to do about Okarun’s condition, Momo finally asks his name. Turns out it’s Ken Takakura. That’s our first episode wham like, and punctuated with a nice fireball explosion, it’s kind of hillarious.
Now, that’s quite a few beats in one episode. Shockingly, though, it’s not rushed at all. The production of DanDaDan, at least here in episode 1, is incredibly artful. There’s a stunning use of silence in the scene where Momo and Okarun are talking at school, as Momo realizes she may have just been a bit of a jerk. And the art? The art is crazy in the perfect way. It makes heavy use of colors and distortions that really recall the psychadelic media of the cold war era where a lot of these stories (at least the alien ones) spawned and were popularized. The unreal, unsettling, or otherworldly bits look and feel like something really different, rather than relying too heavily on straight shots and literal depictions.
And you might wonder if I wouldn’t normally take issue to using a lot of camera tricks, but the trick (pun intended) is that you need to use them where they fit and are in service to something. When a director uses “artsy” tricks because they want “to be art” without understanding the reasons these techniques should be deployed and the places to deploy them, that’s bad. When these things are used with purpose, in a way that supports the specific material, it can be amazing. Look no farther than Dusk Maiden of Amnesia for that.
Here, we have a show about “the occult” – Ghosts, monsters, aliens, and all that jazz. And I’ve hit up shows about the occult before, where they often have a problem looking and feeling like they’re really about nothing at all. Probably the worst offender would be Occult Academy, but it’s hardly alone.
Here though, because the show is dripping in intense style, it feels like it has more of an identity. Knowing where the material goes I think DanDaDan also aces having its own take on the material, but we’ll see how that translates to screen.
I will speak ahead to one other thing from the source material though, as a mild warning and spot of hope for those going in blind. The first couple of arcs have a probably greater than healthy love of the fact that the creators could get away with talking about genitalia. With Okarun’s stolen by a ghost, there’s a lot of issue about that, which is sometimes distracting. However, as the material goes on, that childish infatuation fades, and we get more weight and focus on the earnest material that, honestly, is already here. To highlight something else from the first episode that my anime only readers can watch right now, we get compelling backstories for both Momo and Okarun and how they relate to their supernatural fixations, in a way that feels solid, supported, and not really force-fed because the pacing is good. That, and some monster-battling action, is more what keeps you coming back to DanDaDan than bananas.