Studio Mappa’s anime to make Anime is a surprisingly refreshing Isekai

A new year means a new season of anime for fans to add to their weekly rotation or include in their an ever-growing pile of backlog series they swear they’ll get there any day now. While 2025 will see a head-to-head streaming battle between anime de facto Crunchyroll and rising star Netflix, the former has just released an anime from Jujutsu Kaisen and Attack on Titan studio Map that threw anime fans for a loop with its premiere episode.

Before his release, Zenshua clever play on the Japanese phrase “whole collection” or “complete works,” it piqued the interest of anime fans with its marketable premise about the process of producing an anime by a visually worn-out animator. Although this is not the first time that an anime has pulled back the curtain and made art for the sake of making art (see Keep your hands off Eizouken, Blue periodand Look back), Zenshu it had people’s curiosity because it was an anime Map. As mentioned earlier, Mappa is widely regarded as the anime studio to watch, and many of their wrapsheets involve some of the most critically acclaimed shonen anime. It’s also a study with an equal amount of controversy online about it repeated cases of alleged labor crunch to get his highly regarded anime out of the gate. Map that creates an anime about the challenges of the animation process was bound to be intriguing independently. However, ZenshuThe first episode of the episode misled fans in its first few moments, revealing that it is an isekai anime.

Isekai is an anime fantasy genre that has quickly become an easy punching bag for anime fans due to how oversaturated the medium has become over the past decade. While there are some standouts in shows like Re: Zero and Reincarnation without workIsekai shows tend to be derivative power fantasy anime about social recluses in the everyday world to get a second chance at life in a whimsical fantasy setting with divine powers. And while there’s nothing wrong with looking at something that stimulates the brain in the same way that an iced sugar cookie would, fans didn’t expect Mappa to take the isekai route with Zenshu. However, Mappa finds something new in its approach to the isekai genre with Zenshu first episode.

She alone 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 accelerates from being an animator fresh out of high school to becoming the creator of a generation-defining anime. Its success propels her to lead a romantic comedy animated film in the same spirit as the director Makoto Shinkai Your name o by Mamoru Hosoda The girl who jumped through time. However, Natsuko struggles to grasp the concept, having never felt the joy of a first love. He doesn’t help his situation by redoing key animations and storyboards that his assistants have written, and he insists on letting his disheveled hair grow unruly until the project is finished. After some ego-scrolling doom-scrolling on social media, Natsuko discovers that the director behind a critical flop (and the anime that sparked her love of the craft) has died. This is where Natsuko unceremoniously pops her food, dies, and is isekai’d into the anime’s fantasy world.

Natsuko quickly gathers that she has 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 story to save her heroes from certain doom. . This power manifests itself in his magic peg bar, which acts like the purple crayon Harold and the Purple Crayon (or a piece of chalk from Nickelodeon’s ChalkZone for cool kids). Her first feat sees her draw a monstrous kaiju with genga and settei production markers crudely animated with every movement of her body; it gets a bunch of cool points for being a one-on-one reference shot Neon Genesis Evangelion‘s Hideaki Annothe cutting animation from Hayao Miyazaki1984 Studio Ghibli fantasy film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
.

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-established anime genre, ZenshuThe current premiere episode is a balance as one of the most conceptually intriguing original anime that the industry has produced in years. Its comedic elements take clever jabs at the genre while using its latent potential to analyze fiction and reality in a manner prepared to refresh the narrative. While it is still too early to say if Zenshu it will be up to animators what Look back and One Piece fan letter was to the anime community last year, it will certainly leave a good first impression that will have the gumption to deliver a riveting isekai while providing a meta-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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