Kaiju noun – Any of various giant monsters featured in Japanese films and television programmes (or those in a similar style made elsewhere). Cf. kaiju eiga n. Frequently attributive. *Oed.com*

I felt I should finally give a definition to Kaiju for people. What with my talks about Godzilla, Ultraman and many other Giant monster or Tokusatsu movies, it felt overdue. But this review is not about a Tokusatsu or Kaiju film. No today we are looking at what was one of the big hyped anime of the previous season.

Kaiju No. 8 is a Shonen anime adapted from the manga. But right away a large difference is that rather than some teen or young protagonist, our lead Kafka Hibino is a fully grown man, in his 30s. This for people that don’t realize Dragonball starts with Goku as a child and that Z is just the later half of that, is not the norm. The creator of the manga Naoya Matsumoto was somewhat inspired by the tales of friends and people he knew getting their big breaks built that into this manga. Kafka Hibino starts out as someone who it would seem that his chance to live the life he dreamed of as a child is long past.

This is a world where Kaiju, mysterious monsters, size varying from some human size, some bus and some giant. We open up during one Kaiju rampage taken down by Kafka’s childhood friend Mina Ashiro who is practically a celebrity due to her skill and is an icon of the defence force. We meet our Lead Kafka, not as a great defeater of Kaiju, but part of the Kaiju disposal company. It does make sense in a world with giant monsters, there would need to be a job of disposing of their large bodies. He has since passed the age of acceptance to take the test to join the defence corps so has resigned himself to his fate. This changes in 2 ways. First, Reno Ichikawa joins the clean up crew who reveals due to lower recruited numbers (a detail that doesn’t make sense in the show’s own story) has raised the maximum age, meaning Kafka has another chance, which he decides to take after an encounter with a large spider like kaiju which he and Reno work together to survive.

Second, and more importantly, while in the hospital recovering, a strange bug like kaiju says “found you” and flies into his mouth, and Kafka is transformed into a Kaiju hybrid. Think a bit like the Gyver in design, or any transforming superhero but more fleshy…. and this is all in the first episode. Yes, all that world building (and elements I didn’t cover) all in episode one, which is a great episode to watch.

Following that comes the story of him working to join the defence force while hiding his Kaiju nature, and the arising of a sinister threat that has disturbing abilities.

Some of the best moments of the show aren’t when Kafka is using his Kaiju powers but rather his years of kaiju knowledge he got from his work before to analyse and aid the rest of the defence force’s third division (spoiler he got in) to deal with kaiju problems. The young people are all far more capable of fighting but he brings something different  rather than just some hot blooded show of power and speed. It’s a refreshing element in a Shonen show.

There’s A LOT more I could talk about, many other characters, episode 3 is where a lot of the rest of the cast are introduced. But I don’t want this to be too long. The show does a great job of introducing itself in episode 1 with then episode 2 giving us the whole Kaiju transformation stuff that the show is sort of sold on so if you don’t like the show by the end of episode 2, you probably aren’t going to like it.

The show currently has 12 episodes with a second season planned for next year, but if that’s not enough the manga is currently at 13 volumes and over 100 chapters, plus since this is a current hot topic it’s easy to find.

Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍