Paru Itagaki’s ‘Sanda’ Is the Kind Of Weird That Actually Means Something

As far as the manga industry is concerned, Chainsaw Man creator Tatsuki Fujimoto tends to enjoy the lion’s share of acclaim for being one of manga’s wildest creators, crafting works like Fire Punch that are so outlandish they feel like they shouldn’t have the kind of narrative meat you could really sink your teeth into and chew over. But they do. They aren’t just spectacles for spectacle’s sake, and he certainly deserves the praise. But a creator who doesn’t get talked about nearly enough is Paru Itagaki, best known as the mind behind Netflix’s Beastars and now Prime Video’s Science Saru anime, Sanda.

It’s hard to exactly put a finger on what Science Saru‘s new Sanda anime is. Murder mystery with horror elements? Sure. Battle shonen? Probably goes without saying. However, now that we’re halfway through the Prime Video show, the other shoe has dropped on the theming, and from what we’ve already gleaned, it’s further proof that Itagaki truly is one of the unspoken masters of making weird manga premises that actually mean something if you give her time to let her cook and see what she serves.

But first: What’s Paru Itagaki’s deal?

Anime fans often treat Itagaki’s work as a measuring stick for how freaky a manga or anime can get while playing its premise completely straight. As a sort of backhanded compliment, she’s considered a true writer who lets her freak flag fly, mostly because Beastars got saddled with the reputation of being “that furry anime†everyone noped out of, like walking out of a theater halfway through Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid before letting the other shoe drop. But if you stuck around, you got to witness a master at work.

Somehow, Itagaki squeezed lemons and made an ample serving of lemonade with Beastars off of a premise that essentially asked, What if Zootopia went all the way? Carnivore “survival of the fittest†privilege, speciesism, and classism (and every other “ism†if you squint) wrapped in a high school murder mystery drama with teeth about a wolf and a rabbit’s whirlwind romance.

And she’s done this before. In fact, like fellow female mangaka Rumiko Takahashi releasing formative banger after banger with works like Ranma 1/2, Urusei Yatsura, and Inuyasha, Itagaki has consistently created out-of-the-box, introspective works masquerading under outlandish premises that would otherwise scare away the layman reader. In her other manga, like Ushimitsu Gao, she’s asked, “What if cuckoldry via ghost possession was a romance story?†or “What if pets were transformed into humans to address a declining birth rate crisis?†in Taika’s Reason. Itagaki knows what she’s about, and considering her dad is Keisuke Itagaki—the Baki the Grappler guy—it makes sense that she’d go the other way with their collective ability to create works that are beautiful and repulsive in equal measure. He’s all about the human body as an enemy in martial arts; she’s all about the human soul as an enigma.

Now: Sanda and how Itagaki gift-wrapped a poignant theme in a wacky package

Which finally brings us to Sanda, recently adapted by Science Saru (of Dan Da Dan fame). At first, the anime felt like a waiting game, with viewers umming and aahing over when the other shoe would drop, and Itagaki’s work would give fans a peek at the present she had under wraps in her latest bit of weirdo gospel. Its premise, which sees a boy named Sanda Kazushige turning into Santa Claus whenever he touches something red and attending a school seemingly in a post-apocalyptic world with low birth rates and very few adults in sight, was the umm. His classmate, Shiori, being deadset on spending Christmas with their missing classmate, Ichie Ono (perhaps romantically, perhaps not), was the aah. With episode 5, the shoe slipped.

What’s revealed is something stranger and deeper than its first episode’s admittedly weird week-to-week revelations: A world where children aren’t allowed to sleep because sleep triggers puberty. And puberty is dangerous. The school’s headmaster, Hifumi Oshibu—a 92-year-old plastic-surgery-obsessed cyborg—covets the ephemeral aesthetics of youth like a trophy. The oxytocin released from his body heals his surgical scars, and he even has his own heart preserved in a jar. Subtext is for cowards!

Yet, despite all his surgeries, going so far as to replace his eyes with circuitry, he’s still the kind of guy who proves you can fake everything but the shriveled-up raisins his hands have become with age. Oshibu will go to great lengths to enforce his common sense upon the students, right up to assembling a private militia to maintain the secrets around sleep. Hence why Ono, the missing student who returned very much alive, reveals she fled because she reached puberty while sleeping next to her gal pal, Shiori, and woke up from a dream of a sapphic awakening. If Oshibu would go so far as to protect children who murder adults by not treating their homicide as breaking the law, there’s no telling what lengths his brand of authority would go to punish a child for dreaming and, in turn, growing up on their campus.

The school acts as a detention center, a terrarium that virtually helicopter parents its children, trying to keep them from the messy chemical changes that come with growing up and, in its shielding, stunting its children’s hearts and minds from ever making that next step toward the adulthood their hormonal inclinations are propelling them toward. Meanwhile, the only way for Sanda—who’s going through his own hormonal confusion as a child that can turn into an unkillable adult—to fulfill his dreams to help his classmates’ wishes come true is to only grow stronger as Santa, something he can only do when his classmates can sleep and dream of this mythical, mystical hero figure. And that’s not even taking into consideration the love triangle between him, Shiori, and Ono. It’s a tug-of-war between a society obsessed with preserving childhood and kids desperate to grow up.

Therein lies the real story under Itagaki’s latest anime iceberg. Sanda isn’t just a weird battle shonen with a Santa gimmick just in time for the holidays. It’s about the perversion of innocence, the commodification of wonder, and the awkward, liminal space between childhood and adulthood. How your heart and hands age at different speeds than the rest of you, and how teenagers who say and do the darndest things endeavor to push back against the systems that only want them to remain precious flowers, trapped in amber.

And with Science Saru, who cut their teeth on Devilman Crybaby, Night Is Short, Walk On Girl, and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, you get the perfect studio to bring that brand of weird sincerity to life, animating the surreal heartache, side-busting physical comedy, and bombastic action.

Granted, we’re only just over the halfway mark of the season, and Sanda could still rug-pull in any direction, rendering this armchair read of its nesting doll themes moot. But for the time being, the series has all the fixings of a show graced by the Paru Itagaki effect. It’s a story about the cost of growing up, the fear of letting go, and the systems that try to freeze kids in time. The fact a kid can Shazam into Santa is almost ancillary. If you stick with its weirdness long enough, you’ll find a diamond where you otherwise might’ve only seen coal.

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