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An attack by an eco-terrorist organization unveils the birth of a half-human, half-chimpanzee named Charlie. After growing up with foster parents and homeschooling, Charlie enrolls in a high school and encounters many strange looks, a few bullies, and a friend. Meanwhile, the eco-terrorist organization is getting more extreme and wants to get Charlie involved with them, if at all possible. Their involvement makes people even more suspicious of Charlie's differences in appearance, ability, and worldview.

The Darwin Incident is based onShun Umezawa'sThe Darwin Incident manga. The anime series is streaming on Prime Video on Tuesdays.

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Caitlin Moore
Rating:

Ah, here it is: the coveted 3.5-star review. The rating of “That was all well and good, but I can't say I'm interested in watching more.” I had an inkling that's whereThe Darwin Incident would end up, based on what I've heard of the manga.

My big question now is whether or not this series is as smart as it thinks it is. The way Charlie's peers respond to him feels real enough, with confused stares and the celebrity treatment all stemming from a curiosity that is at once totally understandable and alienating to Charlie. During his lunch period, they pepper him with questions: What's it like being a humanzee? He doesn't know the answer, since he's never been anything else. When Ozzy antagonizes him over his vegan diet, he's operating with the exact kind of “I'll own him with facts and logic” mentality that so many aggrieved teenage boys use.

I want to give the script credit for understanding that this is teens being teens, children who think they've got the world figured out when they're repeating the same questions everyone else did at that age. I also suspect Lucy is named after the fossilized hominid discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, which is a clever reference if nothing else. But then Charlie pulls a butterfly out of a spiderweb, a philosophical exploration of whether certain lives are worth more than others that has been a cliche sinceTrigun at the earliest, and I worry that maybe this show is about to present well-worn thought experiments while presenting itself as deep.

Amazon has dubbed the series in several languages, and I watched the episode in both Japanese and English. While the English track isn't as egregiously clunky asThe Dinner Table Detective orNinja vs. Gokudo, both of which had people wondering if they had been dubbed using AI voice actors, Japanese is definitely the way to go. Few of the actors have more than one or two credits to their names, and most of them sound like random guys pulled in off the street. The Japanese cast, on the other hand, boasts the likes ofToshiyuki Morikawa andAkio Ōtsuka.Atsumi Tanezaki especially stands out as Charlie: quiet, hesitant, and unsure of how to interact with his peers. Someone who's trying to stand out as little as possible, even though his very existence makes him stand out.

The Darwin Incident didn't enthrall me so much that I feel the need to break from my usual preferences and keep watching it; however, it's solid work if you're looking for something a bit more gekiga-inspired than the usual fare.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

Thematically, I get what this anime is about. It's using its story to ask questions about human nature. Through Charlie and Lucy, we get into topics like: What is it like to be human? What is it like to not be? Can we truly ever understand one another? Through Charlie's mother, we explore the idea of “normal” and society's obsession with not standing out—even when, in Charlie's case, it is literally impossible.

From there, it delves into moral quandaries about the value of life—specifically, non-human life. Is all life truly equal? Or is human life somehow special? This goes beyond the ethics of consuming meat. Is it all right to kill an animal in self-defense? What about a person?

And then, beyond all of this, we get Charlie himself. Unquestionably inhuman, he nonetheless shows an inherent bias towards kindness—be that jumping out a window to save a girl and a cat or plucking a butterfly from a spider's web.

My issue with the show is not what deeper truths it's trying to explore, but rather how it does so. I'm still just kind of hung up on the hows and whys when it comes to Charlie's creation in the first place. I mean, what was the intended point? Like, when they were writing up their mad science proposals, how did they sell it? How did they get funding? Why do it in the US and not somewhere with less strict genetic engineering laws?

Then we get the eco terrorists. It's one thing to break into an animal testing lab. It's another entirely to bomb a cafe of civilians. They feel half-baked—like caricatures rather than characters. They are simply tools in the plot to give an excuse to talk about the themes.

The “bully” students at Charlie's school feel the same. While I enjoyed that they seemed multi-layered (with the popular girls cheering Lucy on during the cat rescue and even the bully having a backstory that gives him a reason to act out), the whole situation between them and charlie felt contrived—like the thematic discussion was formed first and then the characters were forced to do things to make that conversation come about regardless of whether it felt real or made sense.

So in the end, I'm left with an anime where I enjoy what it's exploring but feel let down by how it's doing it. I may give it one more episode, but I'm still on the fence.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

The Darwin Incident may have its heart in the right place. I find it hard to fault anyone who would free animals from a testing facility, especially one where someone has been so unscrupulous as to gene-edit a chimpanzee baby to create a human-chimpanzee hybrid. I have to think that has something to do with why the poor chimpanzee mother is miscarrying. I don't love that guns were involved, but this is a story with A Point to Make, and that point is almost certainly going to revolve around violence and whether it's ever justified. In the opening salvo, as well as the closing, that violence is against humans and whether their lives are worth any more than those of animals in a science setting. In the middle of the episode, the violence is about whether or not people should eat meat and other animal products.

I don't have an answer about veganism versus other forms of nutrition; I tend to be of the “you do your thing, I'll do mine” persuasion when it comes to those arguments. But in the context of the show, I'm more concerned about how on the nose this story is shaping up to be. After all, this is a series where the female lead is named Lucy, which I have to think is a shout-out to the famousAustralopithecus afarensis who helped inform our knowledge of human evolution. And this Lucy is positioned to be the “link” between the protagonist, Charlie, and the rest of the world, or at least the high school. It's not particularly subtle.

But nothing about this episode is, from Ozzie's loudmouthed attempts to look smarter than Charlie to Charlie's own fascination with carnivores, shown twice on screen when he watches a snake eat a bird and later saves a butterfly from a spider's web. It's fine that this has something to say, but it perhaps could trust its audience a bit more when it comes to grasping the message. Although Charlie himself is still very much a cipher, this episode may be showing how obvious the world around him is, while he, as a being removed from both the human and animal worlds, doesn't fit into any of the very clear molds we see in the plot.

Fortunately, this is one ofAmazon's better simul-dubs (in English, at any rate), so watching it in your preferred language is easy either way. The voices match nicely, and the art does a decent job of making it look like it really does take place in the US, even if the high school is cleaner than any I've ever been in. It may not be quite as smart as it thinks it is, butThe Darwin Incident still has something to say that's probably worth listening to.

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