Studio Mappa’s anime about making anime is a surprisingly refreshing Isekai

A new year means a new season of anime that fans can add to their weekly rotation or include in their series A growing pile of series backlog They swore they would make it any day now. While 2025 will see a streaming battle between actual anime giant Crunchyroll and rising star Netflix, the former has just released an anime of Jujutsu Kaisen and Attack on Titan Mappa Studio, which impressed anime fans with its first episode.

Before its release, Zenshua clever play on the Japanese phrase “complete collection” or “complete works”, piqued the interest of anime fans with its marketable premise about the anime production process from a visually worn-out animator. While this isn’t the first time anime has pulled back the curtain and made art about making art (see Keep your hands away from your family, Blue periodand Look back), Zenshu People were curious because it was from the Mappa anime. As previously mentioned, Mappa is widely regarded as a must-see anime studio, and many of their covers include some of the most popular shounen anime. It’s also a studio that has an equal amount of online controversy surrounding it Frequent cases of alleged workers’ crisis To get a highly regarded anime out the door. Mappa creating an anime around the challenges of the animation process was interesting regardless. but, ZenshuThe first episode of the series upset fans in its first moments, as it revealed that it was an isekai anime.

Isekai is a fantasy genre of anime that has quickly become an easy punching bag for anime fans due to how saturated the medium has become over the past decade. While there are some notable features in the offerings like Re: zero and The reincarnation of the unemployedisekai shows tend to be power fantasy anime about socially isolated people 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 that an icing sugar cookie does, fans didn’t expect Mapa to go the isekai route with Zenshu. However, Mappa finds something new in her approach to the isekai genre Zinshu First episode.

You have caused emotional damage to all isekai fans pic.twitter.com/SDasgvZEN3

– Brandon Varnell (@BrandonBVarnell) January 6, 2025

Zenshu The film revolves around a woman named Natsuko Hirose, who quickly goes from being an animator fresh out of high school to becoming the creator of an anime series that defines a generation. Her success prompted her to direct an animated romantic comedy film in the same spirit as the director Makoto Shinkai your name or Mamoru Hosoda The girl who jumped through time. However, Natsuko struggles to nail the concept, as she has never felt the joy of first love. She doesn’t help her situation by redoing key animation and storyboards penned by her assistants, and insists on letting her shaggy hair grow wild until the project is finished. After soul-searching on social media, Natsuko discovers that the director behind the critical failure (and the anime that sparked her love of the craft) has died. This is where Natsuko unceremoniously chokes on her food, dies, and is thrust into the fantasy world of said anime.

Natsuko soon piece together that she has been kidnapped and laments that the phenomenon only happens to unemployed losers before discovering that she can recreate entire scenes from the dystopian fairy tale to save its heroes from certain doom. This power is manifested in her magical binding ribbon, which acts like the purple crayon it contains Harold and the Purple Pen (Or a piece of chalk from Nickelodeon’s Chalk area For cool kids). Her first achievement has her drawing monstrous kaiju using Ginja and City production markers that move raw with her every body movement; It gets a bunch of cool points for being a single reference shot Neon Genesis Evangelion‘s Hideaki AnoAnimation cut from Hayao MiyazakiA 1984 fantasy film produced by Studio Ghibli Nausicaa Valley of the Wind
.

Nausicaa/Zenshu Episode 1.
Special idea for Hideaki Ano 🥲 https://t.co/1eQji1E0SL pic.twitter.com/DzD4xeeFp5

– Katsuka (@Katsuka) January 7, 2025

Although isekai is a popular anime genre, ZenshuThe first episode of the anime strikes the balance as one of the most conceptually interesting original anime the industry has produced in years. Its comedic elements take witty critiques of the genre while using its inherent potential to dissect fantasy and reality in a way that lends itself to refreshing storytelling. While it is still too early to know whether Zenshu Animators will have what Look back and One Piece fan letter Introduced to the anime community last year, it certainly makes a good first impression as it has the smarts to deliver an interesting isekai while providing a textual insight into the animation process from one of the industry’s leading studios.

New episodes of Zenshu Premieres every Sunday on Crunchyroll.

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