The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Sakamoto Days

Taro Sakamoto was the ultimate assassin, feared by villains and admired by hitmen. But one day, he fell in love. Retirement, marriage, fatherhood, and then... Sakamoto gained weight. The chubby guy running the neighborhood store is actually a former legendary hitman.

Sakamoto Days is based on a manga series by Yuuto Suzuki. The anime series is streaming on Netflix on Saturdays.

If I were going to watch one violent anime this season, it would be this one. That's not because it's less gory than the other options available, but rather because of the way it's framed. Sakamoto Days is about leaving the violence behind, or at least pretending to, while still keeping your assassination skills up to date and using them to thwart other, worse hitmen while making sure that the world in general and your shabby convenience store, in particular, remain safe. It's violence I can get behind.

It's also very, very silly, and perfectly aware of that fact. Taro Sakamoto, best hitman in the business, has taken a semi-permanent vacation to marry the love of his life, raise his daughter, and eat his wife's amazing cooking. Sure, he's gotten a little (or a lot) out of shape, but he's living his best life as a domestic family man…until his erstwhile protégé Shin the Clairvoyant shows up. Or so you'd think, because this episode is all about the vaguely ridiculous contrasts, meaning that things will not go as Shin or his boss planned. That's less summary and more premise – assassins discovering the joys of an ordinary life, possibly against their will.

It's also a bit thin as a plot, but the way this episode is executed makes up for it. Although I don't love the way the colors or shadows are applied (they're a bit too neat and clean, if that makes sense), the overall use of color is excellent. The episode opens in sepia tones before shifting to bright colors when Sakamoto falls for his wife. His daily family life remains in those bold tones, but when he takes a step back into the world of hitmen, the colors are shaded down into grittier versions of themselves, whites becoming greys and a mildew-like sheen on everything else. It at once emphasizes and ignores the lunacy of Sakamoto fighting guns with cough drops and rubber bands or knocking someone off their game with a well-applied custard cream bun to the face. The fights look serious until you step back and think about them.

Since this is a Netflix release, it dropped with both sub and dub at once, and I think they're both pretty good. I ended up preferring the sub for the voices of Sakamoto's wife and daughter, which sound a little more natural than their too-bright English versions, although that may be a very deliberate choice on the part of the English ADR to emphasize the disconnect between Sakamoto's two worlds. Sakamoto himself barely speaks, and half of his lines are heard telepathically by Shin; at first, I was afraid he was being given a “fat voice,” but I don't think that's the case. Instead, it's a way of differentiating spoken versus thought lines, albeit one that doesn't work exceptionally well.

Still, this is off to a promising start. As with my feelings about the first volume of the manga, I'm not sure how long this can maintain an actual plot beyond “Sakamoto rehabilitates hitmen into convenience store clerks,” but it's hard to beat its understanding of its own inherent contradictions, and in this episode at least, it's a lot of fun.