I don’t know whether I liked that, but it was certainly interesting. Sanda hits the ground running with a premiere which was certainly impactful. It was a lot of things and I’m not sure what they all are yet, which is both its promise and its potential downfall. But if boring is the worst sin an anime can commit – especially in a first episode – it’s off to a strong start. Both visually and in terms of story, this was flashy and grabby to the point of being over the top. Again, that’s not always the best sign for the long term but for a premiere, it serves a purpose.

Sanda, for those uninitiated, is from the pen of mangaka Itagaki Paru. She of course is most famous for Beastars, a series I like quite a bit. Sanda doesn’t reach the same levels of commercial success or critical acclaim, but Dekin no Mogura shows the folly of relying too much on those metrics. A purely practical worry here is that the manga is 16 volumes (and complete), and we don’t know how many episodes the anime is getting. If it’s a single cour that has disaster written all over it, but for now that’s a completely unknown variable.

In point of fact, this premiere reminded me more of Taizan-5 than Itagaki. There’s a visual element that’s reminiscent for starters – though partly that may be due to the weirdness of seeing her characters in non-CGI. Mostly it’s tone and content. As in, high drama from the opening frames and no letup from there. That’s generally unsustainable but this is Itagaki, not Taizan (he could never sustain a series for 16 volumes anyway). It’s also notable that this was a really cool-looking episode. Shimoyama Tomohisa has barely directed, but one can infer from the legion of auteurs who’ve hired him that he’s a respected talent. It’s a sneaky-good staff at Science SARU in fact, with a lot of notable talents from across the industry.

Sanda is the tale of the titular 2nd year middle-schooler (Murase Ayumu). This is an unspecified future date, when Japan no longer has four seasons (anyone who’s lived here will understand why that’s hilarious) and holidays like Christmas are a distant memory. We open with Sanda’s classmate Fuyumura Shiori (Shouji Umeka) trying to stab him with a knife. Sanda convinces himself that this is some sort of pubertal gesture of affection – the fact that he’s in love with her himself is obviously persuasive. But she’s serious, and eventually she starts talking about a curse.

The curse, as it turns out, is that Sanda is directly descended from Santa Claus. How Fuyumura found this out is unclear, but she wants him to transform so he can use his super Santa powers to locate the missing love of her life, Ono Ichie (Nagase Anna). Fortunately for Sanda she turns out to have been right (I’m not 100% sure but he seems to have known himself). One of the ways he can transform is by wearing anything red – he turns back by eating “Bratty Beans“. And the Santa he transforms into is a buff muscle dude in boxers (Touchi Hiroki) who’s unable to resist the wish of a child. Even if the child is a sociopath.

And, make no mistake, Fuyumura is a sociopath. I hated her, and that’s a problem in and of itself. She thinks nothing of stabbing Sanda in the heart on the basis of a theory in order to achieve her selfish aims. She straps a bomb to herself and threatens to blow up her entire class unless he transforms and finds it. Santa may not be able to despise her, but I do. And if the game is going to be to make Fuyumura sympathetic, that’s already a major hurdle for me. But we’ll see if that’s the case. Itagaki does love to blur those sorts of lines so this kind of thing is nothing new for her.

As I’m sure you can tell from all that, Sanda is one weird show. Notable, stylish, not out of the cookie-cutter, provocative, and manic – but most of all weird. I don’t know what to make of it yet but there are certainly worse places to be after a first episode than that. I do have a certain measure of faith in Itagaki but not bottomless – I have issues with Beastars to be sure, as much as I admire it. If anything I’m glad Sanda doesn’t remind me of it in the slightest – that’s better in that at least she’s exploring new ground here. Is that an exploration on which I want to follow her? Check back with after next week, and probably beyond.