Spy X Family - Anime Review

One of the more talked about anime I've seen come out this year, and I can see why now that the show has wrapped up for this season. Focused mostly on Twilight, the country's top spy, he is on a mission to start a family and get his kid into a prestigious academy and get closer to a certain politician. His fake wife is an assassin who wants to appear normal, and the fake child is a mind reader who wants to keep this going because she thinks it's cool and has always had a thing for spy shows.

Quite frankly, the reason why Twilight is going this route makes little to no sense considering the time frame, but it also doesn't matter. The show isn't built around the logical progression of a person's actions or even the political intrigue that is normally involved in a spy show. So critiquing how much sense everything makes is rather pointless. Spy X Family is at its heart two things, a comedy and a story of a man becoming a father.

Starting with comedy, the show has an interesting way of handling it. You have some comedies that are just over the top and insane, along the lines of Excel Saga. A show like that is just trying to wrap you up in the insanity of it all. Other times you have something like the early season of South Park where you have a straight man reacting to how insane everything is, in the case of South Park you had Kyle and Stan. Spy X Family is odd in that the more you think about it, the more insane the show is. But everyone treats everything that happens deadly seriously. The best spy in the country spent months undercover as someone's boyfriend just to expose someone for wearing a toupee. People died over this. No one died over a mission involving top-secret chemical weapons potentially falling into the hands of terrorists, but they died over a hairpiece. This is not to the detriment of the show, frankly, I think the show presents the perfect amount of stupid to be funny. As normal I won't sit here and discuss every joke, but this is what you can expect to get in general from the show concerning the comedy.

The second part is the emotional crux of the show, and that is Twilight himself. He has his mission as a spy, but at the same time, he's starting to care for this strange little fake family he has assembled. This is what makes the show more than just a bunch of laughs because as time goes on you start to see him learn about being an actual father for Anya and husband to Yor. While he keeps telling himself it's about the mission, it's not long before you realize that genuine bonds are forming between them. The show is a great mix of making you both laugh and care the entire time.

What I will say is that while Twilight himself is fantastic, the rest of the characters are fairly one-note. Anya, I won't lump in with this statement, she is portrayed very well as an excitable little girl, but while the rest of the characters are all pretty funny they are also fairly uninteresting. Even Yor, who takes up a fair amount of screen time, isn't really all that deep of a character yet. For a twelve-episode run with Twilight being the main focus, this isn't a huge detriment to the show, but it does have me worried about another season. As much fun as this was, I don't find myself all that interested in where this is going because it seems obvious to me. I'll still check out the second season when it's out, but I find myself wanting more out of the other characters past Twilight.

It's a really enjoyable show, but I think as time goes on and the hype does down it's not going to be one of the modern classics. That said I don't think anyone is going to look back on this as a bad show either. It's funny, it's charming, and I don't think most people would be disappointed having sat down to watch it.