Beelzebub works better as anime (Review)

Beelzebub tells us a story of very strong delinquent called Oga Tatsumi, who happens to stumble upon a baby, who is heir to the demon lord. This baby Beel forms a contract with Oga which means that they can't go further from each other or Oga dies..

Beelzebub just might be one of those rare series that work better as anime than a manga. The flow of the series and anime adaptation feels entertaining and that's what's most important. Somehow Beelzebub manga's style didn't have as strong effect to me and I found myself a bit too bored. It's like Beelzebub is made for anime adaptation, as it works like that for me a lot better. Beelzebub anime seems to channel better it's comedic style. So I have to lean on actually recommending Beelzebub anime rather than manga. The best option of course is to find out yourself which works better.

Animation of Beelzebub has been done in a good manner, it's such a fresh series to have been animated so I don't really wonder. It may be that they put in their best in the first episodes, but I had to admit that at least the first one was very impressive in terms of animation. After watching couple of dozens of episodes I at least didn't recognize same stuff that has lately been going in One Piece anime: after Enies Lobby the animation quality dropped tremendously for one reason or another.

Beelzebub is very much character driven series. It revolves pretty much around Oga, Baby Beel and various side characters that vary from good to bad. I believe that the author intended at first Beelzebub to be somewhat similar to Gintama in terms of story flow. It's easy to recognize that the author has at least tried it, but in my opinion the humor half of the series' pales in comparison to the other half of the series: battle shonen which can be considered as promising.

Story of Beelzebub is pretty generic, as it involves demons, contracts between them etc. However the way that all these things are shown to readers/watchers is a relatively fresh one. What I myself hate about Beelzebub is that it tries to be partly a humor gag manga in which it doesn't succeed, but that mostly means that I basically have never liked that type of manga anyway. However what somewhat saves what left to save in Beelzebub is it's "traditional battle shonen" qualities which I mentioned earlier that manage to make the series some continuity as well as make it a little bit more interesting.

When I several years ago almost completely switched from anime to manga mostly because of low production values, it got harder and harder to watch actual episodes in continuing series (One Piece, Naruto in example).  Now I realize that I'm slowly making a small kind of transition back to anime - Of course I'll most likely never let go of manga as I did with anime adaptations, but I'll be most likely spending more time watching some episodes than trying to find new series to read. This is very positive, since anime at it's best is very entertaining, but it usually requires some production values.

It hasn't been long since I watched all 87 episodes of Toriko which are all that have been released at this point and I must say that I enjoyed them. Of course there are some minor obvious stuff that animators make to "stretch" the story to fit into anime episodes, which I will never get used to, but overall I certainly liked Toriko as anime. It may of course be one of deciding factors that I think Toriko is an exceptionally good series.