Beelzebub

べるぜバブ

6.0(1)

OtakuDen

7.8(296,136)

MAL Score

Ranked #1053

Popularity #397

Action
Comedy
Supernatural
Childcare
Delinquents
School

Episodes: 60
Duration: 24 min per ep
Aired: Jan 9, 2011 to Mar 25, 2012
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

Ishiyama High is a haven for delinquents where brawls are routine and order is practically nonexistent. Even there, one warning carries weight: first-year Tatsumi Oga is the last person anyone wants to pick a fight with.

While spending time by a riverbed, Oga pulls a drifting man from the water—only for the stranger to split apart and reveal a baby that promptly latches onto him. The infant is Kaiser de Emperana Beelzebub IV, better known as “Baby Beel,” heir to the Demon Lord. Oga’s new “partner” comes with Hildegard, Baby Beel’s demon caretaker, and the unlikely pair find themselves trying to manage childcare amid schoolyard chaos, delinquent rivalries, and supernatural trouble.

Otaku Consensus

Beelzebub earns its strong crowd reputation, with a 7.84 MAL average from 296,090 votes and a 75/100 AniList score, because Yoshihiro Takamoto’s direction and Masahiro Yokotani’s series composition turn delinquent violence, demon weirdness, and childcare panic into a fast gag machine rather than a standard battle-shounen climb. The adaptation works best when it embraces Ryuuhei Tamura’s premise as self-mocking schoolyard chaos, which is why reviews repeatedly single out its humor and genre-parody instincts. Its most consistent weakness is the loose middle stretch: even positive reviewers note that many episodes feel random or only lightly connected to the underlying plot.

Why You Should Watch

Watch Beelzebub if you want school-brawl shounen energy without the tournament-arc solemnity. It scratches a similar itch to Gintama’s gag escalation and Cromartie High’s delinquent absurdity, but with more supernatural slapstick and a stronger action-comedy spine. The appeal is in the collision of hard-faced bruisers, deadpan demon etiquette, and domestic responsibilities treated like a street fight. At 60 episodes, it has room to wander into volleyball, mahjong, crossdressing comedy, and other side detours that a tighter one-cour show would cut. Viewers who need strict plot momentum may get impatient, but anyone who likes their action anime loud, ridiculous, and willing to punch its own genre conventions in the face will find the rhythm easy to binge.

Key Characters

T
Tatsumi Oga
Oga stands out because he functions as both the most feared delinquent in the room and the deadpan straight man to the show’s supernatural nonsense.
K
Kaiser de Emperana Beelzebub IV
Baby Beel is treated less like a passive mascot and more like a chaos amplifier, turning routine school-comedy beats into demonic escalation.
H
Hildegard
Hildegard gives the series its sharpest contrast, bringing formal demon-caretaker severity into scenes built around juvenile brawls and slapstick parenting.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
Pierrot Plus produced a full 60-episode run from January 2011 to March 2012, giving the anime far more room for recurring gags and side detours than a typical one- or two-cour action comedy.
2
Masahiro Yokotani’s series composition leans into episodic gag construction; this is a major part of the show’s identity and also the source of its most common criticism, since reviewers note that many installments barely advance the central storyline.
3
The AniList tag profile is unusually specific for a shounen action comedy: Demons at 93%, Delinquents at 92%, School at 77%, and both Family Life and Parenthood at 65%, reflecting how evenly the series mixes supernatural combat, schoolyard hierarchy, and childcare humor.
4
Its comedy range is broader than the core genre labels suggest, with AniList users tagging Crossdressing at 50%, Volleyball at 40%, Mahjong at 20%, and LGBTQ+ Themes at 25%, showing how often the anime diverts into gag premises outside standard demon-battle material.
5
The creative team includes director Yoshihiro Takamoto, character designer Tsuyoshi Yoshioka, prop designer Yoshinori Iwanaga, and art director Junichi Higashi, a production setup that separates character comedy, object gags, and school/demon-world visual staging into distinct credit areas.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: Beelzebub’s original creator is Ryuuhei Tamura, while the TV anime’s overall script structure was handled by Masahiro Yokotani under director Yoshihiro Takamoto.
Fun fact 2: The show’s MAL Popularity rank of #397 is notably higher than its MAL Rank of #1052, indicating a series with broad exposure and lasting visibility rather than a niche critical-only reputation.
Fun fact 3: The anime aired continuously from January 9, 2011 to March 25, 2012, making it a rare 60-episode modern comedy-action run rather than a compact seasonal adaptation.
Fun fact 4: Web reviews consistently frame the series as a comedy first, even when praising its action and school-fight elements; one recurring critical note is that the underlying plot exists, but the episode-to-episode structure often prioritizes randomness.
Fun fact 5: AniList lists 2,266 favourites for the series, a useful signal that its fanbase is driven by attachment to the cast and comedic format as much as by its average score.