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Rating: Go Nagai's "Devilman" reflects the primal instincts of humanity's struggle against its ancestral fears, that of Devils, or so-called Demons.
The story begins like this: Akira Fudo is a shy boy, mocked at school by his peers because he’s a nerd awkward with girls. Luckily, he has an admirer, the beautiful Miki Makimura, who sees in Akira a well-mannered boy with sound principles, something difficult to find among the boys attending their school. Suddenly, Ryo Asuka, an old friend of Akira's, appears, having gone through hell: his father, a very famous researcher, committed suicide by dousing himself with gasoline, for some unspecified reason. The story of the anime I am writing about, however, is somewhat different in some points from Go Nagai's manga. But I will focus on describing the plot of this OAV.
The reason why Ryo Asuka's father killed himself is as simple as it is incredible. He had become a bloodthirsty demon, a monster that tried to kill even his beloved son. And in a last flicker of humanity, he decided to end it all for the good of everyone. In fact, Ryo's father had discovered a secret too great to be kept by just one person: "The truth about Demons."
Millennial beings who had been asleep for hundreds of years in the Himalayan glaciers. The true beings who had created and inhabited the world until the advent of man were about to awaken from their millennial slumber. And they wanted to reclaim their planet through the extermination of the human race.
There was only one possibility to stop the demons on the rampage. Fuse the soul of a gentle, good man with a pure spirit with that of a demon, thereby transforming into a man-demon, with a human heart but the terrifying physical strength of a devil.
Ryo explains all this to Akira, who is astonished and incredulous at his friend's words. But this is only the beginning, because Ryo has decided that it will be Akira who will undergo fusion with a demon, seeing in him the perfect man, the pure and reserved boy, with a vigilant and pure conscience who can perform this monstrous act, not transforming into a full-blooded demon with a bloodthirsty heart, but into a "Devilman" who will fight against the demonic kind for the salvation of mankind.
And so it is that at Ryo's house the much-acclaimed fusion of Akira with one of the most powerful and strong demons of the devilish kind, Amon, the most bloodthirsty and vengeful among all demons, takes place. However, for this fusion to occur, the man must give in to the basest instincts, get intoxicated, and drink until his senses are altered, become violent and no longer master of himself and his actions.
So it is that in a disco full of men and women intent on unleashing the basest instincts, like in a black mass, the demons are awakened by blood, violence, and drugs. Many demons possess the bodies of the people crammed into the disco. Ryo does not transform but is attacked by a bloodthirsty devil, while Akira, now desperate and frightened, is overtaken by the savage force of Amon, who merges with the shy boy. From here the legend begins. Amon, the vengeful and bloodthirsty demon, transforms into a Devilman with a human heart and kills one by one all his old demonic companions for the good of humanity.
After the massacre, Akira returns to human form, seeks out Ryo, and finds him under a pile of lifeless and mutilated bodies... and the film ends on these harrowing screams: "Ryo! Why don't you answer?! Please! Don't leave me alone in this hell!! Ryo! Don't die Ryo! RYOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"
A masterpiece of Japanese animation, now a classic. The character of Devilman is, in fact, the darkest of Nagai's entire career.
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