Amazon is never going to win awards for promoting its exclusive anime titles, and I’m not the first or last person to point that out. It completely dropped the ball with Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX, City: The Animation, and New Panty & Stocking With Garterbelt, basically leaving it to the studios themselves to hype each episode on X/Twitter week after week. In essence, Prime Video is where shows go for anime fans to say, “Oh, that came out?” which sucks because they have a lot of weird titles worth watching on the streamer.
Granted, the above series are relatively easy sells to folks just starting their anime-watching journey, thanks to their name recognition and word-of-mouth recommendations alone in the anime community helping them bail out of streamer obscurity. However, one new Prime Video series that feels like it materialized out of thin air—and whose whole intrigue is that it’s a hard sell—is The Darwin Incident. And honestly, that’s kind of the whole magic of the show: it makes absolutely no sense on paper, yet somehow compels you to keep watching just to see what bizarre development hits next.
For everyone who remembers the opening scene in 28 Days Later and looks back on the new Planet of the Apes movies fondly, The Darwin Incident kind of kicks off in a similar fashion. Based on the seinen manga of the same name by Shun Umezawa, the anime starts with a bunch of eco-terrorists claiming to be from the Animal Liberation Alliance breaking into a secret testing facility to free all the critters inside from being used for experiments. The icing on the cake for the would-be terrorists already out of their depth is when they discover a pregnant chimpanzee who gives birth to a half-human baby, aptly called a “humanzee.” Just when your eyebrow raises at the obvious WTF implications of this whole deal, which happens in the span of the show’s opening moments, the show jumps forward 15 years later.
Here, we see Charlie, the humanzee, adjusting to a new life with doting foster parents as he tries to integrate into society by going to high school. His goal, or at least the goal thrust upon him, is to gain human rights by proving how normal a boy he is, which he fails to do with flying colors. To his credit, he gets a friend in a girl named Lucy, who is giving “girl who dives headfirst into political discourse because she’s crushing on a boy who’s different” hard, but their friendship and inevitable romance (?) are pretty much the only things keeping his curiosity about humanity from being apathetically antagonistic. Whenever he’s not getting incessantly bullied for being vegan, and let’s not forget, he’s a human-chimpanzee hybrid, he’s being positioned as the symbol of a vegan terrorist plot.
If the above description didn’t drive the point home, allow me to reiterate: the show is very weird. And to its credit, it leans into the weirdness of its premise by walking the line between seriousness and being completely unserious, with scenes where Charlie, a real IDGAFer, nonchalantly speaks his mind to shut down adults and teenagers alike, showing how apathetic he is to the discrepancy between what separates humanity from animals. Like, we’re talking first-year psychology levels of debate bro shit slinging coming Charlie’s way that tries to shut down his nonchalant interlocutors, really selling the whole petulant nature of high schoolers in a way that feels pretty genuine despite the show’s wild premise.
If anything, every other word coming out of his mouth is genuine rage baiting to anyone on the receiving end of his disconcerned disposition to his whole existence being perpendicular to the world through the monotone delivery of his voice actor, Yenni Ann, so that it becomes a pretty entertaining watch to see Charlie throw down verbally and physically whenever the moment arises. And when the latter happens, the monkey boy aura farms like crazy, standing in the threshold of doorways and punching the lights out of terrorists and police alike.
While the show is only a handful of episodes deep, it’s easy to find yourself coming back to it just to see what the monkey boy will do next. Although its overarching conspiratorial plotline is a slow burn, the seinen anime’s smattering of comedy—intentional or otherwise—lands pretty well on the whole. My favorite scene to date sees Lucy and Charlie spending their lunch break trying to endear him to his classmates by butting in on cafeteria conversations about how cool Heath Ledger’s Joker and Immortan Joe from Mad Max: Fury Road are… only to settle on not needing more friends besides themselves when they fail, naturally attracting new friends by the reverse psychology of how teenagers work.
Plus, did I mention Charlie is a “humanzee”? It also doesn’t hurt that the show’s opening and ending themes are bops, sweetening the pot for folks who are morbidly curious to see how this whole thing pans out.
So if you’re hurting for a real off-kilter anime to feed your morbid curiosity for a story that can practically go any direction from episode to episode, you can check out new installments of The Darwin Incident every Tuesday on Prime Video.
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