Anime Spotlight #65: DanDaDan

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Animeister.

Just in case you've been living under a rock for the past two years...stay under there. It's safer and cheaper than "normal living." But also, DanDaDan is super-popular right now and the perfect anime for me to shed the Anime Spotlight on for Halloween week. And if you've been given the mixed blessing of not living under a rock in 2025, you know exactly why that is.

Written and illustrated by Yukinobu Tatsu (art assistant on Chainsaw Man and Hell's Paradise), DanDaDan is an insane, random, pervy, supernatural coming-of-age shōnen story that began its life as a web manga in 2021. The manga is still ongoing, and recieved an anime adaptation in 2024 with its second season having recently concluded and a third season already announced for next year.

In DanDaDan, high school gal Momo Ayase (Abby Trott, dub voice of The Elusive Samurai) is the brash, outspoken, romantically unlucky granddaughter of a badass exorcist (Kari Wahlgren, a.k.a. Haruka in FLCL and Celty in Durarara!). Ken "Okarun" Takakura (dubbed by Tokyo Revengers' A.J. Beckles, and so nicknamed because Momo can't deal with him having the same name as her celebrity crush) is the most introverted, awkward sci-fi nerd ever put to paper. She believes in ghosts but not aliens or cryptids. He believes the opposite. But when worlds collide and Okarun gets his magic testicles stolen and his body cursed by a perverted, geriatric speedster ghost with the dub voice of Rita Repulsa from Power Rangers (yes, I'm serious about the entire contents of this sentence and review, including the stuff I haven't written yet at this point),

it will turn out that both of them are right and everything exists, from mixed-media, penis-harvesting sumo aliens and boxing-obsessed, milk-drinking crab aliens to hair-bondage acrobat ghosts with mommy issues and a pair of deceased star-crossed lovers trapped in those mannequins with the removable organs that you see in doctors' offices and high school biology labs.

Unfortunately, game recognizes game, so while Okarun and Momo search for his scattered balls, all manner of weird shit comes crawling out of the woodwork and falling out of the sky to confront them, like Tatsu-sensei isn't a person but an AI program trained on Sam Raimi movies, FLCL, Family Guy scripts, MadLibs prompts, and every documented iteration of "The Aristocrats" joke, and his leading odd couple (just don't call them that particular C-word, or their brains might melt from embarrassment) must suffer the output by learning to work together without ruining their already shaky school reputations (which almost never works when aliens are involved because they inevitably end up in public, "this really, really, really, etc. isn't what it looks like" scenarios whenever the dimension shift wears off). Things get kind of annoying with the addition of two new characters in the second half of Season 1: a two-faced rival for Okarun's affections with a savior complex (Shiratori, dubbed by Lisa Reimold, Delicious In Dungeon) who winds up possessed by the aforementioned acrobatic ghost, and the cringey, diabetically cheerful Jiji (Aleks Le, Demon Slayer), whose house will be the setting for the first arc of Season 2. But before I get to that (and I'm kicking myself with a giant spirit-foot right now for not working it in earlier), Season 1's music bangs hard, starting with what should definitively be considered DanDaDan's theme song, brought to you by Creepy Nuts (Call Of the Night),

and wrapping up each episode with a cheerful, breathily manic Zutomayo track.

Season Two's music is less captivating, despite the opening ("Kakumei Dōchū" by AiNA THE END)

having similar energy to the first season's ending theme and reminding me a bit of YOASOBI's "Idol" track for Oshi No Ko, and I ended up watching WurtS' "Doukashiteru"

at the end of the majority of the episodes because it's also fun and energetic. But following Creepy Nuts is hard!

Instead of doing the joke you would expect me to make here because I've used it enough lately and Blogger doesn't layout two images with different alignments very well across platforms, I'm just going to get into Season 2.

The feeling of the author just being a random AI shit-poster continues to grow from here as the second season of DanDaDan picks up right where the story left us last time.

Jiji gets his own possession form this season that the rest of the gang spend their downtime trying to make friends with (for the fighting game enthusiasts out there, the Evil Eye, as it's called, is a cross between Urien from Street Fighter and CR7 from City Of the Wolves, it has the personality of a violent Saiyan toddler with a magnifying glass and an ant farm, and it's one of the visual and literary draws of the season) in between testicle hunts, a fight with the homicidal suicide-worm cult who own Jiji's house, training Okarun's turbo form with a rhythm game battle against reality-warping classical composer ghosts, rebuilding the Ayase shrine with psychic alien Minecraft technology after the Evil Eye destroys it, the introduction of a heavy metal exorcist band (vocals by Kishow, and they slam!), and a mecha otaku (Bryce Papenbrook, Attack On Titan, Seven Deadly Sins, and Sword Art Online, just to name a few) transforming the shrine into a giant Buddha GundaMazinGurren thing to fight off a sexy Evangelion/Urusei Yatsura alien in a size-shifting bendy-straw Godzilla suit.

Science Saru does an incredible job bringing all of this arbitrary, sometimes "and then"-structured, awesome nonsense to life, the story happening between the crazy setpieces is solid and funny, the horror is unsettling, and the new characters have started to grow on me. But when said characters began to fall into the same, "get possessed and have magic powers" pattern as Okarun, I began to worry.

Yes, I know it doesn't exactly line up as coherent criticism to complain about predictability and randomness as flaws of the same show, but being smartly, consistently incoherent is kind of DanDaDan's thing, and it's better and worse for it, sometimes at the same time. It does bother me that three of the first four main characters introduced have basically the same power origin (including Shiratori, whose two-faced interactions with the group lack nuance, depth, or variety beyond the story's "need" for an unstable, bipedal harem trope), and I guess certain chosen references (the Minecraft pandering, specifically) feel less necessary or inspired than others, and I was triggered into a

frame of mind. The basic connective tissue of the story is fine most of the time, though, and the apparent randomness is creative more often than it is derivative, contributing heavily to DanDaDan's in-the-moment entertainment value.

So...maybe I'm indulging in cynicism for the sake of criticism. Maybe I'm right. Maybe I enjoyed watching DanDaDan more than I enjoyed writing about it. Maybe I need to search out my own golden balls and muster up the...magic...to admit when I'm being unduly harsh, because DanDaDan really is a good time and a feast for the eyes, and I will be eating Season 3 when it comes.

Tomorrow is the HeroMachine compilation special, so please Stay Tuned and remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to sell my golden gonads for a bag of candy in this economy, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Animeister,

DoneDaDone.