SANDA

The Weight of the Red Suit

I’ve seen enough strange anime premises that I thought I was inoculated against surprise, but *Sanda* still hit me like a dare someone forgot to retract. The setup is wild: a near-future Japan with a collapsing birth rate, children treated like endangered treasure, and a fourteen-year-old boy named Kazushige Sanda whose body can explode into a huge adult Santa Claus whenever he touches red or downs a jellybean. Not the jolly department-store version, either—this Santa is a bearded bruiser built to protect kids. On paper, it sounds like a joke with too many steps. In execution, it becomes something unexpectedly tender and bruising. Beneath the absurdity, *Sanda* is really about the panic of growing up before your mind is ready to keep pace with your body.



The emotional logic snaps into focus once you remember who wrote it. Paru Itagaki, the creator of *Beastars*, has a gift for taking heavy social anxieties and smuggling them into stories that sound impossible when summarized aloud. Working with the wonderfully odd people at Science SARU, she turns *Sanda* into a story about adults who love the idea of childhood so much they end up suffocating actual children. The whole society wants kids preserved, frozen, protected into nonexistence. Sanda, stuck between his meek adolescent self and this gigantic mythic adult body, becomes a walking version of adolescence: the body lurching ahead, the psyche trying to catch up.

There’s an early scene that shows just how well Science SARU understands that idea. Shiori Fuyumura, desperate to find her missing friend, literally attacks Sanda to trigger his powers. The sequence starts like a schoolyard panic attack—fast, messy, breathless—then detonates into transformation. Limbs lengthen, weight drops into his stance, the whole body reorients from bullied-kid defensiveness to something enormous and godlike. But the best part isn’t the explosion. It’s the beat right after. Even in Santa form, even looking like a folklore bruiser, Sanda’s eyes keep flicking around with the nervous confusion of a middle-schooler who has no clue what to do with the attention suddenly on him. That dissonance is the whole show.



A lot of that tension lives in the voice cast. Ayumu Murase, who usually brings a bright, almost frantic energy to younger characters—his work as Hinata in *Haikyu!!* is the obvious touchstone—pulls inward here. His Sanda sounds tight, apologetic, permanently unsure of how much space he’s allowed to take up. Then the adult Santa form hands the voice off to Hiroki Touchi, whose deep baritone should signal certainty, except the writing never lets him settle into that. Touchi is essentially voicing a child trapped inside a tank. The handoff between the two actors is so clean that the emotional line never breaks. It’s a quietly impressive piece of casting.



Not every ambitious move lands. Sometimes the mythology gets so elaborate that the pacing starts to sag, and the jump from social satire to straight-up shonen combat can give you a little whiplash. (Whether that reads as a problem or part of the fun really depends on how much genre collision you can take.) Still, I keep coming back to what Isaiah Colbert wrote for *Gizmodo*, calling it a story "about the perversion of innocence, the commodification of wonder, and the awkward, liminal space between childhood and adulthood." That awkward middle space is supposed to be messy. *Sanda* doesn’t sand it down, and it doesn’t dodge the series’ refreshingly explicit queer themes either. It just offers these kids a guardian who is as disoriented as they are. There’s something unexpectedly moving about that.