Air Date: November 1, 1987

Genres: Horror, Supernatural

Type: OVA

Studio: Oh! Productions

Age Rating: MA

Episode Number: 1

Rating: 7.5/10

/Summary

A gentle high schooler named Akira is walking home when suddenly an old classmate, Ryo approaches him. He wants Akira to see what he was left after his father's suicide. Ryo then shows Akira the truth, the truth that devils exist and will come back to destroy humanity. The only way to possibly stop this is to become one with a demon.

/Review

Devilman: The Birth is part one of the devil man OVAs from the 80s. It's an introduction to the main players and the general plot. The opening scene is what I assume to be the war between angels and devils that ends in the devils losing and being trapped in hell. From what I'm guessing it's based off a story in the bible. The story of Devilman obviously takes heavy influence from the bible in general, gladly this adaptation hasn't lost any of it.

Since this is Devilman it does contain amazingly animated scenes of gore, sex, violence, etc. Which around the time this was coming out and the original source material, it isn't a surprise. What was kinda a surprise is how well animated and presented it is outside of those things. With similar OVAs around the time like Urotsukidoji and La Blue Girl, a lot of the scenes outside of the violence aren't as well done. A lot of the time it'll be still animation without the most detail, but here that's not the case.

I often found my self pausing the video to take in the detail of background art, wondering how long it took to make all of them. A scene that stick out in my head was towards the end of when Akira puts on the devils artifact. The devils start to envelope his body and drown him. What made it stick out was the technique they probably used with animating it. When the devils envelope Akira, its taken from earlier animation cells that showed up. They only colored Akira in the main cell and then left the rest of the cell clear so they could put the previous cells under it. Kinda similar to what they do with backgrounds when animating.

It isn't until you start thinking about that kinda of stuff that really makes me amazed with shit like this. Of course my other favorite scene is the night club one. In all adaptations that scene is consistently one of my favorites.

For this review I don't want to get too deep into the plot or character, as I have not watch the second part. But I will say as a introduction to Devilman, it's good. It doesn't leave out too much detail from what's going on, but it's still short and sweet. You leave the OVA with a good idea of what's going on. It's a bit of a weird praise, but from adaptations around this time they often struggle with explaining things without leaving out detail due to run time. An example off the top of my head would be Midnight Eye.

If you're looking to get into Devilman it's the best place to start. It sets up what to be expected from Devilman well.