A new year means a new season of anime for fans to either add to their weekly rotation or include in their ever-growing pile of backlog series that they swear they’ll get to any day now. While 2025 will see a head-to-head streaming battle between the de facto anime juggernaut Crunchyroll and rising star Netflix, the former just released an anime from Jujutsu Kaisen and Attack on Titan studio Mappa that threw anime fans for a loop with its premiere episode.
Before its release, Zenshu, a clever play on the Japanese phrase “whole collection” or “complete works,” piqued anime fans’ interest with its marketed premise about the production process of an anime from a visually worn-out animator. While this isn’t the first time an anime has pulled back the curtain and made art about making art (see Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, Blue Period, and Look Back), Zenshu had folks’ curiosity because it was a Mappa anime. As mentioned earlier, Mappa is widely regarded as the anime studio to watch, and much of its wrapsheets involve some of the most critically acclaimed shonen anime. It is also a studio with an equal amount of controversy online regarding repeated instances of alleged worker crunch to get its highly regarded anime out the door. Mappa creating an anime about the challenges of the animation process was bound to be intriguing regardless. However, Zenshu‘s first episode swerved fans in its early moments, revealing that it is an isekai anime.
Isekai is a fantasy genre of anime that’s quickly become an easy punching bag for anime fans because of how oversaturated the medium has been for the last decade. While there are some standouts in shows like Re:Zero and Jobless Reincarnation, isekai shows tend to be derivative power fantasy anime about social recluses in the everyday world getting a second chance at life in a whimsical fantasy setting with godly powers. And while there’s nothing wrong with watching something that stimulates the brain in the same way a frosted sugar cookie would, fans did not expect Mappa to take the isekai route with Zenshu. Nevertheless, Mappa finds something novel in its approach to the isekai genre with Zenshu first episode.
She just caused emotional damage to every isekai fan???? pic.twitter.com/SDasgvZEN3
— Brandon Varnell (@BrandonBVarnell) January 6, 2025
Zenshu follows a woman named Natsuko Hirose who fast-tracks from being an animator fresh out of high school to becoming the creator of a generation-defining anime. Her success propels her to lead a romantic comedy feature animated film in the same spirit as director Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name or Mamoru Hosoda’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Still, Natsuko struggles with nailing the concept, having never felt the joy of a first love. She doesn’t help her situation by redoing key animations and storyboards her assistants drafted, and she insists on letting her disheveled hair grow unruly until the project is finished. After ego search doom-scrolling on social media, Natsuko discovers that the director behind a critical flop (and the anime that sparked her love for the craft) has passed away. It’s here where Natsuko unceremoniously chokes on her food, dies, and is isekai’d into the fantasy world of said anime.
Natsuko quickly pieces together that she’s been isekai’d and laments that this phenomenon only happens to unemployed losers before she discovers that she can redraw entire scenes of the tragic fantasy tale to save its heroes from certain doom. This power manifests in her magical peg bar, which acts like the purple crayon in Harold and the Purple Crayon (or a piece of chalk from Nickelodeon’s ChalkZone for the cool kids). Her first feat sees her draw a monstrous kaiju with the genga and settei production markers rawly animated with every movement of its body; it gets a bunch of cool points for being a one-to-one reference shot of Neon Genesis Evangelion‘s Hideaki Anno‘s animation cut from Hayao Miyazaki‘s 1984 Studio Ghibli fantasy film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
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Nausicaa / Zenshu ep 1.
Special thought for Hideaki Anno ???? https://t.co/1eQji1E0SL pic.twitter.com/DzD4xeeFp5— Catsuka (@catsuka) January 7, 2025
Despite isekai being a well-trodden anime genre, Zenshu‘s premiere episode strikes a balance as one of the most conceptually intriguing original anime the industry has produced in years. Its comedic elements take witty jabs at the genre while utilizing its latent potential to analyze fiction and reality in a manner primed for refreshing storytelling. While it is still too early to tell whether Zenshu will be to animators what Look Back and One Piece Fan Letter was to the anime community last year, it certainly leaves a good first impression that it will have the gumption to deliver a riveting isekai while supplying meta-textual insight into the animation process from one of the industry’s leading studios.
New episodes of Zenshu premiere every Sunday on Crunchyroll.
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Isaiah Colbert
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