So I am going to kick off Zero Frights by looking at Devilman titles released in North America. We’ll be starting this process by taking a closer look at the three Devilman anime
released on home video by Discotek. All of these releases are currently in print. Tonight’s blog entry will be on the first of the three, Mao Dante.
Mao Dante (or Demon Lord Dante as it’s often translated) was Go Nagai’s orignal attempt at making a horror based manga where the forces of good and evil are not clearly discernible
at the beginning. Although popular the original 1971 manga was canceled because of the magazine it was published in going under. Despite this it caught the eyes of some executives at Toei animation who wished to create an
anime based around Mao Dante but with slight alterations to make it fit better for TV. So Nagai reworked elements from Mao Dante and Devilman was created. It took almost 30 years of living in Devilman’s shadow ever since
but Mao Dante finally got its due in the year 2002 with a brand new manga Shin Mao Dante (sometimes referred to as New or Neo Mao Dante) that remakes the entire series as well as adding new content--the most prominent of which
being an actual ending, and an anime adaptation of the original 1971 manga which will be our main focus tonight.
The Mao Dante anime comes from that magical era in the early 2000’s where animie studios wanted to remake classics but they were all especially terrible at it. You know right from
the start if you’re picking up a show from 2001 - 2005 that adapts a classic manga you’re in for an awful time. I’m not saying every attempt at it back then was bad, after all we got the much beloved Captain
Herlock: Endless Odyssey (2002) out of that era, but well, I am saying Mao Dante was in good company, with the majority of its contemporaries being more akin to Babel II Beyond Infinity (2001), and the mega hit show that everyone
loves: Genma Wars (2002). Who could forget Genma Wars?!!! I know I can’t; I tried. The less-than-stellar track record of this early 2000’s fad of trying to cash in on classics combined with the fact that most of
these animes were created very cheaply when the use of digital paint was just in its infancy and they all look especially terrible really is a gut punch whenever you scroll through titles of this era. We live in a much better
time where the majority of anime based on classic manga get the treatment they deserve.
So you may be asking yourself, besides some poor presentation what’s so wrong with the Mao Dante anime? Well ignoring the bad animation and funky Adam West Batman - esque soundtrack
(yes, the background music is bonkers, and never fitting for any scene) the worst culprit is the medium itself. The Mao Dante television anime should have never existed. I’m not saying that in a bitter, sarcastic way
either, but as an actual critique from someone who read the manga. You see, Mao Dante is incredibly short, it was published in just 2 manga volumes. It’s a brisk
read, you can honestly finish the entire thing in about 90 minutes, probably even less. There is just barley any content to work with here. The studio behind this adaptation should have instead just focused on creating a feature
film based on Mao Dante or at least only made Mao Dante a 2-3 episode OVA series. Instead we have 13 entire episodes, over 300 minutes of content, telling something you can read the entirety of while cooking dinner. Basically, I hope you like filler content and a story that is paced as fast as snails, because that’s what you’re getting.
This is the most detrimental aspect of the Mao Dante anime, it’s filled to the brim with so much poorly written content not in the original source material, that does not jive well
at all with Nagai’s story. For example, the first 3 episodes, none of that was in the manga, just throw it away. You lose nothing! These early episodes try their best to build a slow and suspenseful atmosphere, almost
like a mystery themed series, but as soon as the original source material comes back into the story, they just feel off. The conspiracy about Satanist trying to summon their lord Dante back to this world just isn’t that
creepy when you later learn these Satanist are lovable outcast, and that Demon Lord Dante is the result of a pissed off dude flying a space ship that is being eaten by a dinosaur while another dinosaur is eating
that dinosaur, and all of them got blasted by fire from God who just turns out to be an alien causing them to mutate into one powerful being. So basically Demon Lord = pissed off dude + space ship + dinosaur + dinosaur
+ alien flamethrower. Got it.
And don’t get me wrong, I love this! I unironically eat this up, this is the campy apeshit kind of science-fiction story I can’t get enough of from the 1970’s. But
that’s just it, at its core, Mao Dante is more of a sci-fi series with Christian imagery than an actual story about the struggle of Heaven and Hell. It’s a battle of disgusting looking espers fighting angelic looking
aliens. All of this occult mystery stuff really is just basic window dressing in the manga and does not need to take up one quarter of the anime. And this has nothing on the awful Four Demon Kings story arc that literally
made no sense and takes up another quarter of the anime. I know Nagai was fast and loose with mythology but at least Medusa feels somewhat at home mixed in with the Christian demons, unlike Buddhist Gods; like what the hell--they
aren’t even European.
So we got a sci-fi series at its core with cool Christian imagery now turned into this mess of an occult mystery-conspiracy, meets Buddhist Gods rampaging through Asia, meets an evil
corporation that is mass producing fake demons to trick people into hating the real demons, meets I dunno, office hijinx? Add filler characters that are dull, and that minor characters from the manga are given new story arcs they
didn’t need nor should have gotten. Why did minor villain Souske need to become a good person? He was a rotten dude in the manga that got off from murdering and torturing innocent demons too weak to fight back. Did I really
need to delve into his internal struggles? By making the villains more symptomatic it honestly does a disservice to the manga. It can be kind of hard to decide who to root for sometime while watching this anime version because everyone is just some kind of muddled where the manga is very straightforward on the characters and that when you get beyond how hideous and grotesque the demons are, they are really the true victims and the good guys.
Mao Dante is a horror anime where everything that shouldn't be ugly is ugly: cheap animation abound, lazy character designs, backgrounds constantly warp and change in size, the story is bastardized: riddled
with filler, terrible pacing, inappropriate thematic elements, and nothing is scary at all. Honestly Mao Dante is unintentionally hilarious most of the time, with the majority of its attempts at frights creating laughs instead.
There’s none of the hyper violence Go Nagai is known for nor any of the sexual content either. It’s an incredibly sterile anime given its material. Stay far away from the Mao Dante anime, no matter how curious
you may be about the origins of Devilman. My suggestion is to just read the manga. It’s a light and easy read that is pretty fun. Any fan of classic manga owes it to themselves. Likewise the 2002 Shin Mao Dante remake
is an incredibly good read that improves greatly on the original material, has a nice ending, and is all around fun too.
