SANDA Premiere Review: Paru Itagaki’s Bold Santa Tale

One thing I always admire about a story from Paru Itagaki, the creator of Beastars, is how quickly I find myself sold on a completely absurd premise. SANDA is no exception. A high concept tale that uses the Santa Claus myth to explore adolescence and the way society fixates on youth sounds strange on paper, yet within a few minutes I was fully on board.

The setup follows the titular Sanda, a fourteen year old who turns out to be a descendant of Santa Claus. That heritage lets him transform into a hulking, mythic version of the figure, a power that first awakens when his classmate Fuyumura asks for his help searching for her missing friend Ono.

There are plenty of playful spins on Santa lore here, like the idea that he is fireproof because he travels down chimneys, or that objects topple around him whenever someone lies, helping him sort the naughty from the nice. Those touches are fun, but the world around them is what really grabbed me.

SANDA is set in a near future where children are almost worshipped and their growth closely monitored, all because of falling birthrates. The apparent villain, Oshibu, runs the strict, compound like school the characters attend, and is a 92 year old man whose body has been kept youthful through advanced surgery, save for his withered hands.

It is a premiere bursting with big, thorny ideas drawn from some of the most complicated issues of our time, and I am genuinely eager to see where its argument goes. The three opening episodes all landed around a 4.0 community score, and SANDA is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

My take: Itagaki has such a gift for wrapping serious themes in delightful weirdness, and SANDA already feels like more than its goofy hook suggests. This is easily one of the most intriguing starts of the season for me.