If you’ve ever wondered what an anime created by David Cronenberg might look like, Parasyte: The Maxim is about as good an answer as you’re likely to find. The series centers around mysterious shape-shifting parasites who burrow into people’s brains and use their bodies as hosts. On the night the parasites first arrive, high school student Shinichi Izumi is wearing headphones, so a parasite seeking his brain ends up in his right arm instead.
Shinichi must then learn to coexist with the parasite, whom he names Migi, which is easier said than done. Despite being highly intelligent, the parasites have no sense of empathy and seek only to preserve their own lives. On top of that, all parasites who successfully took over a human brain have an innate craving to kill and eat people, and many of them consider Shinichi and Migi to be a threat to the species’ long term survival.
Fans of Death Note are going to find a lot to like with Parasyte. In addition to being produced by the same studio, the two series share a lot of thematic similarities: mysterious deaths, amoral supernatural creatures, a teenager with a dark secret. However, whereas Death Note relied far too heavily on bat deduction, gambit roulettes and flashy animation, Parasyte comes by its intrigue a lot more honestly.
The series raises a lot of philosophical questions about human nature, how humans relate to the environment, and whether human standards of morality can be applied to other species. There is also an interesting psychological throughline as Shinichi mentally adapts to Migi’s presence in his body and the parasite characters begin to develop more individualized personalities. The show even manages to touch on scientific theories such as the “selfish gene” and superorganisms. I wouldn’t put it on the level of high literature, but for a mainstream anime, Parasyte is a lot deeper than you might expect.
Which isn’t to say that the series is without its problems. While many of the parasites have a degree of psychological complexity, the human characters almost entirely exist to service Shinichi’s character arc. His love interest, Satomi Murano, is particularly glaring in this regard. Despite serving as Shinichi’s main anchor to his humanity, Satomi is barely a character in her own right. Regardless of all the things she witnesses and how Shinichi treats her, she remains the same loyal puppy dog from the beginning of the first episode to the closing scene of the finale.
There is virtually no fanservice in the series (which is always a plus in my book), but if you are squeamish about gore, this probably isn’t the series for you. There’s nothing in the series I’d consider outright frightening, but there is plenty of creepy imagery and body horror that might bother some.
I initially went with the English dub of the series but found it to be pretty underwhelming and switched to the Japanese, which is the version I recommend. Aya Hirano (Migi) and Atsuko Tanaka (Ryoko Tamiya) both stand out with nuanced performances of characters who by their very nature could have easily lent themselves to flat and unremarkable voice acting.
As to be expected with a Madhouse production, the visuals are top-notch. The character design is decent, the backgrounds are detailed, and most importantly to a show like this, the animation flows very well.
The soundtrack features some dodgey use of dubstep early on, but the music gets a lot better as the series goes on. The opening theme is some truly godawful metalcore, but it’s skipped easily enough.
The narrative arc of Parasyte is extremely satisfying. By the end of the final episode, the series manages to explore all its themes in adequate depth and tie up all its loose ends. Parasyte is one of those shows that’s so good it leaves you wanting more but feels so complex that it’s hard to imagine any continuation that wouldn’t only devalue what we already have.
Unless you have an innate revulsion to body horror, Parasyte: The Maxim is an anime I highly recommend.
Parasyte: The Maxim is available on Crunchyroll and Hulu.
