Summary
Bursting with imagination, My Daemon is a proudly weird animated series that has all the charm of Pokemon with added death, body horror, and nuclear catastrophe.
Not to be reductive, but the best way to describe My Daemon, a really rather good Thai animated series streaming on Netflix, is as Pokémon for adults – or perhaps for serial killers. It’s about humans trying to coexist with (mostly) little creatures who all have special abilities. Some of the humans have permission to use them like pets. The creatures only communicate by saying their own name over and over again in a variety of tones and contexts. You get the idea, I’m sure.
But the creatures are all hideous, some of them are murderous, the world has been ravaged by nuclear calamity, the pet ones are controlled by a shock collar, and everyone’s awful. So, you know – not exactly like Pokémon, but pretty close.
My Daemon Season 1 review and plot summary
A person who isn’t awful – and he sometimes feels like the only one – is series protagonist, Kento, a babyish young boy who lives alone with his mother and his pet daemon, Anna. Now, let’s just get the explanation out of the way. Daemons, in this world, came about by nuclear contamination. Humans hate them for plot-specific reasons. Kento loves them because he’s a wide-eyed idealist, so everyone thinks he’s a loser. Anna looks like a shaved dog held together with duct tape and glue. She’s also festooned with creepy eyeballs, so when Kento insists she’s cute, which he does all the time, it’s a bit of a stretch.
But Kento loves Anna, who has the special ability of “storing” things in a limitless pocket dimension so they can be regurgitated as necessary, and as though no time has elapsed in-between. Ice cubes are still frozen days later. Food on the cusp of spoiling when it was stored is still good. She’s the one thing that all non-human creatures must be in order to survive – she’s useful to humans.
And yet everyone wants to kill Anna anyway. In the process of attempting to do so, they accidentally kill Kento’s mother instead, so he and Anna venture out on a road trip through dystopian Japan in an effort to find a daemon with the power to reverse time and revive her.
RELATED: Will there be a My Daemon Season 2?
This impressively bonkers premise is the main reason to watch My Daemon, which seems to have out-there ideas to spare. One can scarcely go a few minutes – there are 13 episodes – without running into another freakishly arresting monster design or unique ability or cool set-piece. I watched the whole thing in one sitting and by the end, I was in some kind of fugue state, like I was coming down from LSD.
And yet threaded throughout all this is a legitimately coherent philosophical throughline. Yes, some of it is a cautionary tale about nuclear hubris, and there are even some kaiju-sized daemons to make the Godzilla point all the more obvious, but it’s mostly a reminder that if you treat those you deem to be “other” badly then they might just eat you, which is probably a valuable lesson.
This is why Kento is such a naïve sap. He represents the purity in humanity, the instinctive desire for everyone to just get along that all of us have before life really gets its tendrils in. So, he’s easy to like and root for, which is saying a lot, because his relationship with Anna – this might be the fault of the translation or the English dub – is pitched a little weird. I get it’s supposed to be reminiscent of a young boy’s love for his pet, but seriously, he sounds like he’s right on the cusp of taking the thing to bed a lot of the time.
But I’m nitpicking. Kento does have a solid, appropriate arc, from a terrified little idiot to a mostly fearless and intelligent young man, and the people around him are improved by his presence. The Avengers-style finale is an outgrowth of his palatable demeanor, proof that good ideas eventually gain traction if you just repeat them often and loudly enough. In many ways, the essential conflict is resolved on the basis of a promise and a bit of trust. And nukes, to be fair, but this is a sci-fi anime at the end of the day.
An impressively weird effort
Thailand’s Igloo Studio are onto a winner in My Daemon. It’s full of interesting characters and ideas and has an optimistic undertone, which is just as well since it gets very grim and more than a little sad at times. People will like this, I’m sure, and the worldbuilding suggests many more stories to be told in the same universe if they like it enough to move the needle viewership-wise.
If not – and you never know; this has been a bumper year for animation on Netflix, with everything from Pluto to Blue Eye Samurai fighting for space in the thumbnails – then you’ve at the very least got a few hours of imaginative adventure to get involved in. Pack some tissues just in case, set your expectations to “weird”, and enjoy.
What did you think of My Daemon Season 1? Comment below.
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