I guess this season is going to be more midweek-heavy than is normal these days, when at least half the blogging schedule seems to fall on Sunday. It’s been a constant parade of priority titles all week – Ikoku Nikki, Vigilante, Golden Kamuy. And now Darwin Jihen, which is a pretty notable entry. It won the Manga Taishou in 2022 – Samu and I covered it during our Taishou podcast episode. And as honors in the manga world go, that’s pretty close to the top of the ladder.

For me, the manga falls under the “good” umbrella – and it really is good – but not great. Certainly not on the level of some Taishou winners this decade. On the other hand, I would say it’s definitely getting better and more interesting in recent chapters. It also has the distinction of being a serious story about serious things, which is no small feather in its cap. If the execution is good. And on the whole, it’s pretty good. There are definitely clumsy moments, and I’ve struggled at times trying to figure out what Umezawa Shun is trying to say with it. But I’m not so sure that second one amounts to a criticism.

As for the anime, Bellnox Films is not a studio I’d ever heard of before this show was announced, and I can find no other series attached to them in any capacity. But they’ve assembled a pretty experienced staff, and the premiere is certainly fine in terms of production. Nothing special, but fine (kind of on-point in that way). Casting Tanezaki Atsumi as Charlie was an interesting choice – Anya to Freiren to Charlie, that’s quite a spread – but so far I’m buying her in the role. And of course we get the peerless Ohtsuka Akio in the antagonist role as Feyerabend.

The conceit of Umezawa’s story is that a geneticist named Grossman has spliced his genes with a chimpanzee and she carried the resultant child to term. This results in Charlie, dubbed a “humanzee”. We rejoin the story when he’s 15 years old, and about to start attending a human high school (though there are hints an earlier attempt at educational integration was attempted). Charlie is an odd boy, certainly – he seems rather emotionally flat. But he’s obviously intelligent even by human standards, and his physical abilities seem to transcend either human or chimp capabilities.

The setting for this series is Missouri, not a part of the US we generally see represented in anime even on the rare occasions it goes to the States. This is an interesting element in the story for me as someone who grew up in the midwest – albeit Chicago rather than small-town Missouri. There is a bit of the usual funhouse-mirror effect when Japanese writers try and tackle this setting – some stuff just plays as clearly off, and some of the locals are portrayed in pretty unflattering fashion. But then, there are idiots everywhere and rural Missouri is certainly no exception.

Charlie’s first day at school is predictably uneven. He’s not exactly a communicative kid, and the expected bouts of closed-minding bullying occur. Charlie saves a cat from a tree – along with the girl named Lucy who was trying to rescue it – and in the process draws a fair bit of attention to himself. It turns out that Charlie’s researcher step-parents are vegan, and at this point in time a animal rights fringe group called the “Animal Liberation Front” is committing acts of terrorism all over the place. One particularly vapid dude tries to trap Charlie in veganism’s hypocrisy by asking him what he’s do if a mouse carrying a deadly disease was about to bite him. “I’d probably shoot it” Charlie replies. But then adds, “I think if you were the one carrying the disease I’d shoot you too”.

That strikes me as just about the right answer – and not a hypocritical one. Is The Darwin Incident anti-vegan? Anti-environmentalist, anti-American? That’s not a simple question to answer, and the matter of just what “anti-” this series is remains an interesting one to this moment. And interesting is the right word – Darwin Jihen is definitely that. And while it may be a bit askew, its choice of setting allows the story to explore some things animanga normally don’t. It actually is quite American in narrative structure in many ways, but through a Japanese filter. I enjoy that about it, among other things, and if the adaptation doesn’t drop the ball Darwin Jihen should be an anime worth keeping an eye on.