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‘Dandadan’ Season 2 review: Science SARU’s madhouse menagerie is an unhinged masterpiece
‘Dandadan’ Season 2 review: Science SARU’s madhouse menagerie is an unhinged masterpiece
Pitch Dandadan to someone who's never seen it and you'll likely sound like a candidate for psychiatric observation. “So, there's this teenager, whose testicles were pilfered by the spirit of a vengeful granny…” — is when most sane listeners would have excused themselves from the conversation. Season 2 of Science SARU's adaptation of Yokinobu Tatsu's hit manga doubles down on its oddities, featuring demonic babysitting shifts, the sandworm from Dune, perverse landlords straight out of a foreclosure nightmare, an exorcism conducted by Slipknot at a shrine festival, a cavalcade of homicidal classical composers, and just for good measure, Godzilla. Try explaining that at dinner and see how long it takes before someone suggests professional help.
That none of this is parody, is the secret to Dandadan's strange magnetism. It is dead serious in its unseriousness, and makes a meal out of these outlandish garnishes. Its sophomore outing proves once again that Science SARU is the rare studio that can spin art from the insane.
Picking up from last year's cliffhanger, we rejoin Momo Ayase and Ken “Okarun” Takakura, whose awkward flirtations serve as ballast against the chaos swirling around them. Around this unlikely romance, the show erects a hall of mirrors where Japanese yokai folklore, pulp sci-fi, and shounen bravado clash in increasingly outrageous ways. To watch Dandadan is to be constantly reminded that there is no genre boundary Science SARU will not violate with abandon.
A still from ‘Dandadan' Season 2 | Photo Credit: Crunchyroll
The studio has built its reputation on that elasticity, with its characters and frames stretching, snapping, and recombining with rubbery logic. Directors Fuga Yamashiro and Abel Gongora trade off episodes like relay runners racing across a Möbius strip — one leaning toward gothic intensity, and the other toward slapstick neon irreverence. But what's remarkable is how cohesive the pandemonium feels. This is not random weirdness thrown at the wall, but a carefully orchestrated carnival.
The Evil Eye arc dominates this season. Jiji, the once brash interloper in the Momo–Okarun dynamic, emerges as a character of genuine pathos. His possession by the Evil Eye yokai is staged as a tragedy, and the animation itself breaks down into jagged, anxious linework that recalls Masaaki Yuasa at his most expressive.
Of course, Dandadan rarely lingers in solemnity for long. Within minutes, we're hurled into sequences that stretch the limits of what TV animation can do, and the sheer velocity of ideas is intoxicating. Each battle is drenched in its own chromatic identity, with alien encounters seeping into swampy greens, yokai hauntings throbbing in reds and blacks, and the Evil Eye emanating a regal, electric purple. Even the climactic kaiju battle is delivered with the maximalist zeal of Gurren Lagann and Pacific Rim, crossed with the visual gags of Kung Fu Hustle.
A still from ‘Dandadan' Season 2 | Photo Credit: Crunchyroll
And if Dandadan's visuals feel like they're forever folding in on themselves, its soundscape is no less mercurial. Kensuke Ushio scores the season with the eclectic precision of a DJ who delights in keeping the floor off balance, with sugar-rush electronica for adolescent jitters, buzzsaw guitar riffs when fists start flying, and sudden silences when heartbreak intrudes. He also salts the mix with increasingly clever leitmotifs — bells tolling like a funereal joke whenever the Evil Eye slithers in, a subterranean drone heralding the Mongolian Death Worm — that reward you once you start listening for them.
What many have dismissed as Dandadan's fan-pleasing pandering to the male gaze is in fact a sharp satire of Japan's gender politics. Its aliens and yokai aren't just freaks of imagination but stand-ins for incel rage, corporate predation, and the everyday harassment young women are forced to navigate. Beneath its technicolour lunacy, Dandadan stages a duel between tradition and modernity, exposing how both can curdle into violence, and daring its teenage heroine to rewrite the rules with aplomb.
But amid the bedlam of horrors, the show also cultivates surprising intimacy. Whether its ghoulish battles, or hormonal awkwardness, Science SARU treats every register with equal reverence. A yokai duel is given the same weight as a car ride where two teenagers can't quite figure out where to rest their hands. Both are crises; both matter.
The season also sharpens its fondness for the found-family motif. Seiko Ayase's dining table, at first a lonely expanse, becomes a visual refrain: gradually crowded with strays, rivals, and cursed houseguests until it thrums with unlikely kinship. Against backdrops of interdimensional horror, the sight of adolescents eating curry together is improbably moving. Dandadan understands the value of this slow filling of chairs.
A still from ‘Dandadan' Season 2 | Photo Credit: Crunchyroll
Perhaps that is why the series feels so defiantly alive. At a moment when the industry nervously scans for the cold fingerprints of automation, Dandadan wears its humanity openly. Its artists post storyboards on Twitter like love letters and its social media teases mimic tabloid headlines. Every frame seems to declare, almost petulantly: this was made by people.
Season 2 closes on yet another cliffhanger, though Science SARU has immediately dangled the promise of a third. Yet even if this were the swan song for Momo, Okarun and their ever-expanding menagerie, it would already stand as a masterclass in adaptation.
How far can you drag nonsense before it falls apart? Dandadan proves the answer is somewhere between “too far” and “please call an exorcist.” To watch it is to surrender to a rhythm where sincerity and silliness are indistinguishable, and it feels perversely perfect that the most creative anime on television today begins with a missing pair of testicles.
Dandadan is available to stream on Crunchyroll
Published - September 19, 2025 05:43 pm IST
World cinema / cartoons and animation / television / Japan / reviews
Source: The Hindu
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