English Dub Review: Sanda “Everything’s Bright, Am I Aging?”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

In the future year of 2080, Japan’s declining birth rate has only gotten worse, and also Santa Claus and Christmas are considered ancient bygone customs. Middle Schooler Kazushige Sanda, a descendant of Santa, has his festive genes awoken by a classmate Shiori Fuyumura, with the goal of finding a missing student.

OUR TAKE

Dammit, Christmas marketing starts earlier EVERY YEAR! This is October! Halloween time! Stay in your lane, Kringle! Well, in this show’s defense, Fall anime typically start in October and wrap up around Christmas, so in that sense, it’s timed to wrap up at a seasonally appropriate time…except the series STARTS on Christmas, so it’s all kind of a wash I suppose. But yeah, as I have laid out, this series focuses on a new take on Santa Claus with some VERY broad creative liberties. In this case, apparently Santa Claus was a real guy some time ago with descendants who can become a total double of him after some arbitrary but tangentially connected ritual acts, such as giving someone a gift they ask for and wearing all red. And as you may expect for an anime, our humble protagonist Kazushige Sanda does not just morph into any standard Father Christmas, but a totally jacked silver fox Santa in his tighty whities. Sanda himself had been shown to be a kind and helpful guy throughout but denied any connection to Santa Claus…but once his classmate (and I guess crush?) Shiori literally stabs him in order for his blood to qualify as the red on his clothing, he seems to have known this could happen all along.

I’m guessing we’ll get some further clarification on what he did or didn’t know about his holiday ancestry later on, but for now, another key point to this that I should probably bring up here is this story’s clear commentary on Japan’s real life declining birth rate. This is a genuine problem happening in the country, with rates reaching all time lows each successive year. There are SO MANY complex cultural factors involved in this that I am neither qualified to cover nor have anywhere near the time or space to go in any respectable detail on, but it’s clear enough that it’s a present enough issue that it is being commented on in its media, specifically anime, and this possible future dystopia likely has some changes to how it treats kids here that will also be clearer in time. For now, the objective is Shiori trying to get Kazushige to use his Santa powers to help her find her missing friend, who may be dead or worse. But we’ll just have to see how all of that unfolds, along with this sudden rebirth of Santa Claus, in the next few episodes of Sanda.