Aliens vs. Ghosts vs. Absolutely No Chill: What Dandadan Is Actually About
If someone pitched you a show where a high school girl who believes in ghosts teams up with a boy who believes in aliens, they accidentally summon both, and the boy gets his genitals stolen by a ghost in the first episode — you’d assume it was a fever dream. But that’s Dandadan, and that’s precisely why this Dandadan review exists: because this show somehow pulls it off with style, heart, and enough kinetic energy to power a small city.
Dandadan Season 1 is based on Yukinobu Tatsu’s manga adaptation, which started serialization in 2021 and became one of the most talked-about manga in recent memory. The anime adaptation landed in Fall 2024, and it hit like a freight train. The premise is beautifully absurd: Momo Ayase is a girl from a family of spirit mediums — she’s grown up knowing ghosts are real. Her classmate Ken Takakura, nicknamed Okarun, is a hardcore alien believer who thinks ghosts are nonsense. Each thinks the other is delusional. They make a deal: Momo will go to a supposedly alien-haunted location, Okarun will go to a ghost-haunted spot, and whoever’s belief gets confirmed first wins.
They both get confirmed. Simultaneously. And things spiral from there at a pace that barely lets you catch your breath.
The show wastes zero time on setup. Within the first two episodes, Okarun has awakened cursed supernatural powers, Momo has been kidnapped by aliens, and the two of them are fighting back-to-back against monsters that shouldn’t exist. The manga adaptation nails this urgency — Tatsu’s original pacing was already breakneck, and the anime leans into it hard. What you get is a story that keeps stacking weirdness on top of weirdness until it shouldn’t work at all, yet somehow never loses its footing.
Science SARU Went Absolutely Feral With This One
Let’s talk about the animation, because the Dandadan review conversation cannot go five sentences without it. Science SARU — the studio founded by Masaaki Yuasa and Jean-Luc Godard collaborator Eunyoung Choi — has built a reputation for animation that feels alive in a way most studios don’t even try for. Past Science SARU productions like Inu-Oh, Devilman Crybaby, and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! all have a visual language that’s immediately recognizable: fluid, expressive, slightly unhinged in the best way.
With Dandadan, Science SARU didn’t just bring their A-game. They brought something we haven’t quite seen from them before: a hyper-kinetic, almost video-game-like action sensibility that makes the fight sequences feel like they’re drawn from the perspective of someone who’s been running on pure adrenaline for 72 hours. The sakuga in this show is genuinely some of the best of 2025 anime. Momo’s sprint sequences early in the season — especially the famous chase scene — are already being cited as standout moments in the medium.
What makes Science SARU’s approach to Dandadan work so well is that the weirdness of the source material actually matches the studio’s instincts. When Okarun transforms into his cursed form, the animation doesn’t try to make it look cool in a conventional sense — it makes it look wrong and alien and powerful all at once. The ghost and alien designs are grotesque in genuinely creative ways, not just “here’s a scary monster” ways. The color work is saturated and slightly off, which gives the whole show a slightly dreamy, slightly nauseating quality that fits perfectly with the story being told.
Comparing this to other Science SARU shows, Dandadan feels like the studio’s most commercially accessible work without sacrificing any of the artistic ambition. Devilman Crybaby was brutal and heady. Inu-Oh was a historical musical. Eizouken was a love letter to animation itself. Dandadan is all of those instincts focused through a shonen action lens — it’s Science SARU for people who want to have fun while also getting their brain melted.
Okarun and Momo Are the Real Reason You Keep Watching
Here’s the thing about this Dandadan review that might surprise you: as wild as the animation and creature designs are, the actual reason Season 1 hits as hard as it does is the central relationship between Okarun and Momo. These two characters have chemistry that most romance anime spend three entire seasons trying to build, and Dandadan establishes it in three episodes.
Okarun — full name Ken Takakura, but Momo gives him that nickname after he starts using a Turbo Granny curse — is the rare male lead in this genre who is openly, unashamedly vulnerable. He’s timid. He gets scared. He blushes constantly. He tells Momo he loves her with the kind of directness that makes you wonder why every shonen protagonist doesn’t just do this. There’s no multi-season will-they-won’t-they where the audience sits through 80 episodes of missed confessions. Okarun is just into Momo, and he says so, and it’s weirdly refreshing.
Momo, on the other hand, is all energy and stubbornness. She’s loud, physically capable, emotionally impulsive, and genuinely funny. She’s the kind of female protagonist who doesn’t exist to be protected — she’s usually the one doing the protecting. But she’s also got her own insecurities, her own fears, and her own moments of vulnerability that make her feel like a real person rather than a genre archetype.
The manga adaptation did a good job of making their dynamic feel earned rather than manufactured, and the anime enhances it through voice acting that deserves serious recognition. Shion Wakayama’s Momo is a force of nature, and Natsuki Hanae’s Okarun nails the specific cocktail of earnest nerdiness and unexpected bravery that makes the character work. When these two are on screen together, the show has a warmth that cuts right through all the chaos.
The supporting cast adds to this nicely. Jiji and Aira — Momo’s friends who get pulled into the supernatural weirdness — bring their own comedic energy without ever feeling like they’re just there to fill space. The Turbo Granny arc in particular gets a lot of mileage out of the ensemble dynamic, and it’s when the show’s comedic timing is at its sharpest.
The Tonal Whiplash Is Not a Bug — It’s the Whole Point
Every Dandadan review has to address the elephant in the room: this show is genuinely unhinged in terms of tone, and it switches gears so fast that you’ll get whiplash if you’re not prepared. One minute there’s a legitimately terrifying ghost sequence that had me checking my living room corners. The next minute there’s a joke about anatomy so absurd you’ll be laughing before you even process what happened. The minute after that, there’s a romantic moment that lands with surprising emotional weight.
By any conventional logic, this should not work. Comedy and horror and romance all have very specific emotional registers, and mixing them recklessly should produce a mess. Dandadan doesn’t produce a mess. It produces something that feels genuinely alive because it refuses to treat any of its genre elements as secondary. The horror is real horror. The comedy is real comedy. The romance is real romance. The show is not using comedy to undercut the horror or using romance to add stakes to the action. All of it coexists simultaneously, the same way your actual emotional life works — where something can be hilarious and terrifying and meaningful all at once.
This is where the 2025 anime conversation around Dandadan gets interesting. There are very few shows in recent memory that have managed this particular balancing act as well. Chainsaw Man tried it with mixed results — some viewers bounced off the tonal shifts hard. Dandadan seems to have cracked something that Chainsaw Man was reaching for: the sense that the chaos is intentional and controlled, not accidental.
The key is probably the characters. Because we care about Okarun and Momo as actual people, the genre shifts feel grounded. We’re not just watching a horror scene — we’re watching a horror scene that’s happening to someone we’re rooting for. We’re not just watching a comedy bit — we’re watching a comedy bit that tells us something true about how these characters relate to each other. The tonal whiplash works because the emotional throughline never breaks.
It also helps that the writing never winks at the audience. Dandadan takes its own absurdity completely seriously. When Okarun loses his ability to transform because his suppressed emotions are blocking his power, the show treats that as a real character problem worth exploring — not a setup for a punchline. The aliens and ghosts are treated as genuine threats with genuine logic behind them. That straight-faced commitment to its own weird universe is a big part of why the comedy lands: the show is funny because it’s sincere, not because it’s trying to be funny.
How Dandadan Stacks Up Against Other Science SARU Titles
Any serious Dandadan review for the 2025 anime landscape has to place it in context, and the most useful context is Science SARU’s own catalog. The studio has never made the same show twice, and Dandadan is no exception — but it does feel like a kind of culmination of everything they’ve been building toward.
Devilman Crybaby (2018) was the show that put Science SARU on the global map — a brutal, beautiful adaptation that leaned hard into the tragedy of the source material. Dandadan shares some DNA with Devilman in its willingness to go dark, but where Devilman was relentlessly bleak, Dandadan always finds its way back to joy. There’s a warmth in Dandadan that Devilman didn’t have, by design.
Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (2020) is probably the most purely joyful Science SARU production before Dandadan, and you can feel the influence. Eizouken was about passion and creativity expressed through animation; Dandadan channels that same creative energy into physical action and emotional expression. Both shows feel like they were made by people who genuinely love what they’re doing, and that enthusiasm is contagious.
Inu-Oh (2022) is the Science SARU production Dandadan is probably least like — Inu-Oh is a slow, meditative, deeply weird historical film — but both share a commitment to using the full range of animation as a medium rather than treating it as just a way to tell a story more cheaply than live action. In Dandadan, you see that commitment in every action sequence, every character expression, every background detail that didn’t need to be that good but is anyway.
Where Dandadan fits in the Science SARU ranking will depend on what you’re looking for. If you want the studio’s most emotionally devastating work, that’s still Devilman Crybaby. If you want their most purely creative work, Eizouken makes a strong case. But if you want the Science SARU show that best balances all of their strengths — the visual inventiveness, the character work, the tonal range, the sheer entertainment value — Dandadan is the answer, and it’s not particularly close.
Verdict: Dandadan Season 1 Is Mandatory Viewing
This Dandadan review has been dancing around the simple truth, so here it is plainly: Dandadan Season 1 is one of the best anime to come out in years. Not just in 2025 anime — in recent memory, full stop. It’s the rare adaptation that takes a great manga and makes it better by adding something the page couldn’t provide: Science SARU’s kinetic, gorgeous, slightly unhinged visual language, applied to material that was already pushing every boundary it could find.
The show earns its chaos. Every bizarre creature, every whiplash genre switch, every moment where you’re not sure whether to laugh or scream — it all comes from a place of genuine creative vision, not randomness. Tatsu’s manga adaptation gave the anime team something genuinely special to work with, and Science SARU treated it with the respect and ambition it deserved.
Okarun and Momo are an instant-classic duo. Their relationship moves forward at a pace that should feel irresponsible but instead feels honest. The animation is some of the best work Science SARU has ever produced. The comedy is sharp, the horror is real, and the romantic moments hit harder than they have any right to given the surrounding chaos.
If you’ve been sleeping on this one, wake up. Dandadan is the real deal. Season 2 can’t come fast enough.
Score: 9.5 / 10