First Look: Fall 2025 Anime Overview: Sanda

Premise: In a dystopian future, because of the declining birth rate in Japan, there have been a series of policies made to “protect” youth: for example, children all have arranged marriages set up from birth, they can get away with killing adults without being jailed and various things have been enforced to slow down the aging process.

Santa Claus has been forgotten by society…that is, until fourteen-year-old Kuzushige Sanda discovers he’s a descendant of Santa, and as such can transform into a ripped old man with tons of fantastical powers. His classmate Shiori Fuyumura forcibly awakened Sanda's inner Santa because her friend Ono has gone missing, and she’s determined to find her. Since Santa grants the wishes of children, she enlists Sanda’s help.

You can probably already tell from the summary alone that Sanda is…a lot. It has a million things going on at all times, and so many balls-to-the-wall absurd concepts that’s it’s both overwhelming and almost impossible to look away from. An example of an average sequence in Sanda:

Skis pop out of Santa's feet. He runs around naked and gets mistaken for God. He can hug children until they pass out. And that's not even scratching the surface of the weirdness.

The core theme under (and enhanced by) all the absurdity is an exploration of the societal fear of aging and the fetishization of youth and innocence. Sanda sends the message that growing is up natural and people shouldn’t despise or fear aging, and trying to halt that process only leads to pain. It also accurately shows how an obsession with and idealization with "innocence" and "purity" often leads to disturbing and authoritarian behavior It's rich and often thoughtful material...that expressed in an extremely unhinged way. Sanda takes place in a dystopian future where children are treated as extremely precious and special because of the low birth rate—and are also more tightly controlled to keep them young and innocent for as long as possible.

 For instance, the kids are completely controlled so they can't have any kind of sexual feelings--not even allowed to look at nude statues like David. The principal is a sadist 90-something year old man whose entire body except for his hands in made up of plastic surgery including all his organs being replaced, and there's other examples of people being so disgusted with aging they harm themselves. Also the kids aren’t allowed to sleep because it hastens puberty. Oh, and kids don’t get prosecuted if they kill adults, meaning an entire class of the school is child murderers.

There's also an obvious metaphor for how puberty is confusing and messy, this limbo between childhood and adulthood. Sanda has a hard time reconciling his adult self with his kid self—when he’s an adult he sees kids as kids, and in fact, will die if he does anything predatory to kids because, you know, obviously Santa shouldn’t do that. When he turns into Santa he sees children as children, and only wants to protect them.

But Sanda wonders if this applies to his fourteen-year-old self too, and his duties as Santa mean he can’t fall in love with his peers. Sanda has to learn to be a “good adult” but also be free to explore his desires as a child—there’s a pretty obvious parallel to a kid feeling more adult than his friends and struggling with it and the ambiguity of growing up. It does get uncomfortable at times—It’s always clear Santa ISN’T a predator or that the anime knows that’s criminal and unforgiveable, and that kid Sanda and adult are different, but Sanda freaking out over it means there’s a lot of awkward moments.

(Also, sometimes new elements are introduced so abruptly it can feel rushed--stuff like Santa having some more hardcore alternate self out of nowhere being an example...)

Now, the real star of the show for me is Shiori Fuyumura. She has a fantastic character design you rarely see on female characters, she looks like such a little haunted little gremlin, and she is absolutely unhinged in the best way--- for example, she he checks if Sanda is Santa by stabbing him. She makes bombs, takes them everywhere and is fully prepared to blow up herself and the entire classroom to confirm that Sanda is a worthy Santa.

Fuyumura will not let ANYTHING get in the way of finding her girl Ono, and her raw limitless determination is kind of beautiful. She clearly sees Ono as more than friend, and exploring Fuyumura and Ono’s sapphic feelings for each other and how they intertwine with their struggles with puberty and following their desires in a tightly controlled world is a big part of her arc. Fuyumura also brings some gender feels with her, saying at one point she doesn’t quite feel like a boy and not quite like a girl, so it’s very easy to read her as non-binary, and it’s an interesting aspect to tie in with the rest of the themes.

I…am not fond of how Fuyumura and Ono’s story ends, however. I’ll save spoilers for under the cut, but a pretty common trope with fictional lesbians happens—something that I can be okay with when it just happens in a story as a natural storytelling beat that actually centers the character, but I don’t feel it does here. In the end, it kind of just feels like Ono exists to suffer, she’s a prop for everyone else’s story, something to motivate them or make them sad or enable a bonding moment. She's there to drive in the themes rather than her own person. She does have some interiority, and there are some great moments, but there’s also some really unfortunate implications.

Ultimately, Sanda kept me entertained all the way though. The animation is fantastic, the themes are messy and weird in a way I like, and there are some breathtaking moments. You genuinely don’t know what bizarre thing's going to happen next with this series and that can be as compelling as it is stupefying. It can get overwhelming with all the shit it throws at the wall, sometimes feeling like a little too much, and I don’t think everything was executed perfectly, but there’s something fascinating about how wild it gets. The characters are likeable and the villains are detestable. I'd do anything for Fuyumura. BUT…what happens with Fuyumura and Ono also really leaves a sour taste in my mouth, so I can’t it the full enthusiastic recommendation, like it genuinely takes so much of the wind out of the sails. If you’re sensitive to some common lesbian tropes in media, feel free to check under the cut for spoilers about it. The ending to the season also feels pretty abrupt.

SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT

Basically Ono has a wet dream about Fuyumura, and it means she goes through puberty in one night (yes, that’s a thing in the Sanda universe, since they’re not allowed to sleep or whatever). But her body can’t take that sudden puberty, so she ends up sick and dying. She dies the second Fuyumura confesses her love, because of course she does. What might bother me most of all is the high likelihood Fuyumura and Sanda will end up being love interests after this, especially with Ono telling Sanda to “take care of Fuyumura”. Maybe the story will surprise me and they’ll stay friends, but right now it’s looking a lot like “Disposable lesbian gracefully and conveniently dies so the heterosexual man can step in with her partner for the REAL love story", especially since Sanda supporting Fuyumura when she cries over Ono looks to be a big bonding moment for them.

“Girl dies from her gay wet dream” isn’t quite as bad as it sounds, since the story is obviously trying to explore how the suppression of puberty and control adults have over children is what killed her, and it furthers the theme of “suddenly I feel more adult than my peers because of puberty, does this mean I’m not a child like them?” I don’t think that part is homophobic (at least on purpose. Really, none of this is probably on purpose), but the way it played out has those undertones.

Anyway, if that stuff is something you cannot stomach, you can find a lot to like about Sanda, but it left me feel disappointed at the ending of the season.