Animation is a remarkable medium. Its origins in the drawn comics of another, simpler era lend it to be rather fantastical, able to depict concepts that would be impossible in the real world: Clashes between superheroes and grotesque monsters, trips to other planets or dimensions, or just the day-to-day lives of talking animals. Yet the other side of this is that animation can depict very serious real-world issues in a fantastical form that often allows the viewer to understand these problems within a new context. Such is the case of the recent anime adaptation of Shun Umezawa’s The Darwin Incident (aka Darwin Jihen) which began streaming this past winter. This is a story that examines the various currents of 21st century American life within the context of a science-fiction action thriller. It is certainly one of the most unique anime offerings in recent years.
The first thing we need to discuss here is that this show is set in the United States. The cast are all Americans and come from a wide variety of social backgrounds and racial groups. Even though it was created by a Japanese artist and written in that language, the attempt was to clearly depict these characters as first and foremost Americans in thought and action. How successful was Umezawa in his goal? Let us break it down further.
The story starts out in 2005. A group of radical environmental activists known as the Animal Liberation Alliance (ALA) assault a research lab in California to free the animals being tested there. To their great shock, the raiders discover a chimpanzee in distress and losing a ton of blood. Quickly realizing the chimpanzee is female and miscarrying her child, they rush to get it medical attention.
We are then taken to the year 2020. It is revealed that the chimpanzee had given birth to a ‘Humanzee’, a hybrid of human and chimp DNA with tremendous strength, agility, and intelligence. The hybrid was named Charlie (in honor of Charles Darwin) and has been adopted and raised in seclusion by a human couple named Bert and Hannah Stein in the small town of Shrewsville, Missouri. While in the early years of his existence Charlie was a cause célèbre that attracted worldwide attention, he has settled down to a quiet life under the care of his doting adoptive parents. Bert and Hannah are strongly convinced that their son must be allowed to integrate into human society and attend high school so that he can find a place in the world.
We quickly discover that Charlie will face many difficulties trying to grow outside of the sheltered bubble he has lived in. He looks very inhuman, and while he loves his foster parents he feels no particular attachment to humanity as a whole and will bluntly state as such if asked. Still, he is in many ways very human despite outwardly being unemotional and stoic, and his superhuman strength and agility are not a protection from being the target of bullies. However stupid it might seem to provoke such a superhuman being, it is Charlie’s exceptional nature that makes the bullies fear him all the more and wish to keep him in his place as something less than human, a ‘thing’. Only one student at Shrews High accepts him without any hesitation: Lucy Eldred. Despite being attractive and intelligent, Lucy is a social misfit who feels stifled by the small-town mindset of her classmates and sees in Charlie a kindred spirit.
What seems like the start of a heart-warming story about two awkward outsiders working to gain acceptance among their peers is quickly darkened by another plot development. The ALA have reemerged from years of inactivity under the leadership of the charismatic and manipulative Rivera Feyerabend, and he plans to use the old controversy about Charlie as the starting point of a terror campaign to reshape not just America but the entire world. Charlie faces a very great challenge if he is to protect his foster parents and new friend from this sinister force, but he also needs to act cautiously and avoid being labeled a threat to the town of Shrewsville in particular and the American government as a whole.
Obviously, this is a very ambitious story setup. The Darwin Incident attempts to cover many different point of views and plot threads in just thirteen episodes. While the story is outwardly set up as a conflict between radical vegan activists who will resort to any means to achieve their goals of animal emancipation, and regular citizens who range from being indifferent to the issue to violently hostile to being branded as killers for eating meat, this is intended as a stand-in for any number of other political conflicts in modern America. Many of them are directly referenced by the characters during long, information-dense conversations that take up much of the viewing time of each episode: America’s past and current struggles with slavery, race relations, gun control laws, and political polarization. The story is rarely subtle about any of this. Rather than allowing much in the way of slow and steady character development, The Darwin Incident hammers its viewers with one shocking plot twist or narrative conflict after the next. Because of this it feels like Charlie and Lucy’s relationship, which is the narrative bedrock of the story, is rarely allowed to reach any sort of status quo that allows it to develop before another outside force disrupts it. This is very much a series where the force of the narrative overshadows the characters. However, even with all of the breakneck story-telling, we do get real character development and world building as well, even if it is applied in an inconsistent manner.
Umezawa has clearly done more than surface-level research on American culture, especially the rural Midwest where most of the story takes place. He studied the architecture, the wildlife and scenery, and the politics as well. The script, as adapted by veteran screenplay writer Shinichi Inotsume is filled with all sorts of American pop culture references. Some of them, like an off-hand reference to South Park, come off as clumsily thrown in to make the characters seem less Japanese. However, in another episode there is a reference to Heath Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight that was used to illustrate the hypocrisy of some of Charlie’s classmates. A group of nerds at Shrews High talk about admiring the Joker for his ability to live freely outside of society’s rules, but just seconds later meekly submit to peer pressure. It is one of the few times where any subtlety is used in The Darwin Incident, and it made me sad that Umezawa did not use examples like this more often. It would have greatly elevated his attempts to develop the story.
Much of the time though, The Darwin Incident shows its roots as a story written by a foreign author who does not fully understand the subject of his study. This anime is a clear case where a Japanese viewer is going to get a very different experience as opposed to an American one. For as much as Umezawa gets right, and he gets more right than wrong, when he overlooks some subtle cultural point and the characters act more like Japanese people in an American setting than real Americans, it can become distracting. Fortunately, it never got to the point where it derailed my enjoyment of continuing the story. One benefit about the show’s brisk pacing is that it never feels like it is dragging along. Furthermore, every new plot point builds upon something previously established, so the story has a very natural flow to it despite the shock factor that it relies on.
What kind of shock factor am I referring to? I will have to give some spoilers for the middle of the series to further illustrate this point, so if you want to avoid them, please avoid the next few paragraphs after the break.
One of the most memorable story arcs in the first half of the series involves the radicalization of an isolated and depressed student at Shrews High named Gale (or Gare in some translations). Seeing himself as an ‘ally’ of Charlie, Gale is a militant vegan who loudly denounces his classmates as akin to cannibals for eating animal products without heeding the ‘red light’ that farm animals like cows can clearly feel pain and fear. Humans can feel pain and fear too, Gale argues. So why do humans not eat one another as well if they are not concerned that the victims of their appetites feel those emotions?
Gale is crushed that Charlie does not feel the same way he does. Our protagonist believes his status as a Humanzee does not gives him any special insight into whether animals can have the same rights as humans and tries his best to avoid this thorny political issue. Rivera and the ALA have been stalking Charlie and learn about Gale in the process. In a whirlwind of events, Gale is recruited by Rivera and stages a mass school shooting in order to force Charlie to be exposed to political and social pressure to take a side in the conflict. The broadcast of the episodes for this arc included a special viewer disclaimer about the violent and upsetting nature of the events depicted, a rare occurrence in Japanese television.
The school shooting arc is arguably the best example to examine the strengths and weaknesses of The Darwin Incident’s narrative techniques. It is extremely unsettling to see a massacre like this unfold even in animated form. That Gale livestreams his crimes and the authorities run into the issue of the video going viral even as they attempt to suppress its spread across the internet is something that has happened in the real world all too often in the past few decades. Yet it is also rather absurd. Gale was a social outcast at school, but he was clearly not violent before he meets Rivera. Yet by the logic of this story, just a few hours of indoctrination are all it takes for a troubled but well-meaning teenager to be turned into a cold-hearted butcher who wields an assault rifle with the skill of a seasoned soldier. It is poorly thought out and in great part trivializes the varied and very complex social phenomena that have produced the outbreak of mass school shootings across America in the past twenty-eight years.
Umezawa further does disservice to his work by misrepresenting certain aspects of American school preparedness for these kinds of emergencies. Active shooter drills have been a major part of American school life for years, and teachers have often been at the forefront of protecting their charges from harm, to the point of sacrificing their lives. Yet the teachers at Shrews High are shown to panic and disappear almost immediately when danger rears its head. It is unfair in the extreme to dismiss the struggles of a real-world group of professionals in the name of generating more tension in what is already a very exploitative scenario.
Major spoilers end.
With that out of the way, the good news is that this is the lowest point that the series reaches in terms of sensationalism. While there are plenty more scenes of blood-curdling violence and drama depicted throughout the rest of the story, it comes off as far more stylized and connected to the story. That is in spite of how Umezawa remains very ham-fisted in the presentation of his ideas. At its best, The Darwin Incident is an unfolding mystery about the nature of Charlie’s creation and his struggles against Rivera and the ALA.
Charlie himself is an odd protagonist. His character design is sort of cute, but also enters the uncanny valley in how it blends human and chimpanzee features. His face was deliberately designed so that it can express very little emotion (unlike your typical cartoon character), and he speaks in a flat, direct manner that betrays very little emotion in even the most serious of circumstances. Only through story context, his conversations with Lucy, and occasional body language do we get insight into what Charlie is feeling at any given moment. There is a consistent arc through this season of him gradually coming to terms with the emotions of his human half, but it often gets shoved to the background as large plot twists overshadow them.
It is therefore left to Lucy as the main human character to do the heavy lifting of serving as an audience surrogate, get Charlie to open up, and state out loud what is often unspoken by other characters. She is a mix of the Girl Next Door and Wide-Eyed Idealist, with a side of snark. Like many teenagers, she can be fast to judge others and shoot off her mouth without fully considering the consequences, but it always comes from a good place. I could definitely see though that certain viewers will groan about how she is put into a number of awkward and vulnerable positions simply because she is a girl who lacks the raw power of Charlie or the skill or experience of the adult characters. However, it would be straining the credibility of the story to have a sheltered high school student on the same level as the antagonists, who are some very bad men indeed. In summary, there is not much about Lucy that is truly original, but she is executed well for what she is.
Speaking about antagonists, this review would be rather incomplete if we did not talk more about Rivera Feyerabend. He is the best part of the series by far and the major force that keeps it moving. Truly the ladle that stirs the pot, Rivera immediately dominates the screen whenever he appears. His face, clearly modeled after former US President Barack Obama, is never without its trademark grin. Unlike some villains however, Rivera’s jovial personality is not a mask that hides his inner darkness. Rather, he is an unrepentant terrorist who just happens to be every bit as polite and well-mannered as he is violent and merciless. Rivera is very much the sort of man who believes that things must be stated clearly and cordially regardless of the circumstances; whether that is debating on whether moral values are relative or universal, or why he drugged and abducted you from your house as part of his elaborate plan to overthrow human society. His only flaw is that is a little bit too perfect of an antagonist. Always two steps ahead of his enemies, it can come off as contrived how well Rivera sets everything up to fall in his favor regardless of how stacked the odds are against him. It sort of needs to be this way for the story to work though. Charlie is so obviously superhuman both physically and mentally that without a strong enemy to oppose him the plot would quickly peter out and lose any tension.
Among the supporting cast, the most notable figure is that of Philip Graham. He is a recognizable archetype: a crusty, grumpy small-town deputy sheriff with a noble heart who stands up for the right thing even if he often disagrees with it. Phil starts outs suspicious of Charlie due to an incident involving one of his old friends in the police force a decade before the start of the series, but as he is drawn into the unfolding danger, he is rapidly forced to confront those old prejudices. He has one of the most dynamic and well-developed character arcs in the show, and I feel Umezawa uses Phil to demonstrate what is good and honorable about small-town America as a counterbalance to the seedier aspects also depicted.
The Darwin Incident was produced by BELLNOX FILMS, a studio established by Kadokawa in 2024 to expand its share in the animation market. This is the studio’s first project, although many of the production crew have experience working for other companies on major titles like Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. The Darwin Incident is not a big budget title, and large stretches of every episode have several characters standing around debating various topics with little animation beyond mouth flips and hand gestures. However, the characters and backgrounds are drawn well and consistently, which helps mitigate this somewhat. Furthermore, when the show needs to have quality animation for its action sequences, it strongly delivers. A lot of the budget for this anime must have gone into animating Charlie’s movements, as his unnatural agility and strength are demonstrated in extremely vivid imagery. Scenes of him crushing tree branches with his bare hands and performing complicated acrobatic maneuvers are done with great fluidity and impact. Fight scenes in The Darwin Incident feel dangerous and high stakes, and that makes them engaging even if they lack the theatrics of modern shonen anime like Jujutsu Kaisen or Demon Slayer.
The music score, composed by Arisa Okehazama (also behind the scores for The Apothecary Diaries and the above-mentioned Jujutsu Kaisen) and newcomer Mariko Horikawa is solid. While none of the music is especially memorable, it does a good job of working with the animation to establish mood. It works best during the buildup to the action sequences, when it establishes a sense of unease and looming violence. One complaint is that the music did not make any real effort to establish an ‘American’ aesthetic, which is what I was expecting for a show like this. The score could have easily fit in with and been used on any number of other anime titles from the past ten years, and that is a little disappointing. I do not want to come down on the composers more than necessary, but this was a show that would have benefited greatly from breaking the mold and being a little more experimental with the music choices. As it is, the music is adequate if not outstanding.
Taken as a whole, The Darwin Incident is a very uneven production. Yet, I came away feeling that it was greater than the sum of its parts. What you have is a story that for all of its clumsy and sometimes controversial political and philosophical statements is engaging from start to end. An episode would roll credits and I would feel as if it had just started a few minutes earlier. The material is not for everybody by a long shot, as it runs headlong into controversy without any hesitation, but it manages to keep focus and never derails into a spectacle that puts shocking the viewer as the first and highest priority.
As a final warning, the show ends on a major cliffhanger. It only adapts up to the end of the fourth volume of the manga, of which there are ten published as of the time of this review. This series was clearly made to be the first season of an ongoing project, but given the rather limited publicity the show received during its run there is no guarantee of a continuation at this time. From what I understand, the manga chapters that were not animated delve into even more controversial material than what is shown in the anime, which leaves open the question if BELLNOX FILMS or any other anime production studio even wants to touch it. That said, I think The Darwin Incident is a solid anime series that deserves to get more attention. Even if it is imperfect, its willingness to discuss subjects that other series gloss over or outright ignore in the name of greater marketability is worth recognizing. If a second season ever does get green-lighted, I will be eagerly anticipating it.
