The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

ZENSHU

After graduating high school, Natsuko Hirose starts her career as an animator. Her talent quickly flourishes, and she makes her debut as a director in no time. Her first anime becomes a massive hit, sparking a social phenomenon and earning her recognition as an up-and-coming genius director. Her next project is set to be a romantic comedy movie themed around first love. However, having never been in love herself, Natsuko struggles to understand the concept of first love, and as a result, she's unable to create the storyboard, causing the movie production to come to a standstill.

ZENSHU is based on an original series by director Mitsue Yamazaki and scriptwriter Kimiko Ueno. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

I'm sure we all have a story that hugely impacted our childhoods, but that still wasn't entirely satisfactory. Some of my earliest writing efforts were rewriting the endings to books or movies that made the drastic mistake of not going how I wanted them to. For Natsuko, the heroine of ZENSHU., that's the in-world film A Tale of Perishing, the epic fantasy anime that made her want to become an animator. When she dies of food poisoning (we're led to assume), she wakes up right in the middle of it – and now, because she's been brought to another world, she has the chance to change the story.

ZENSHU.'s first episode came out of nowhere and blew me away. Admittedly, it may have “come out of nowhere” because there are so many sequels I'm looking forward to, but still. The plot is just the right combination of elements – it's isekai, yes, but it's also metafictional, with Natsuko's animation skills forming an integral part of her experience. It's not just that she knows the story, like many “reborn in a book/game” protagonists before her; it's that she's always loved it with caveats. Why wouldn't she work to make her beloved protagonist Luke Braveheart's life better? It's my kind of wish fulfillment, but it also speaks to being an anxious person who has fixated on one particular skill.

Natsuko's hair is nearly always in front of her face (leading Unio, Luke, and Memerun to assume she's not human when she first lands in their world), and that's how I spent most of high school – it's a hiding place you always have with you, allowing you to see out but no one else to see in. Natsuko also tries to do as much of her animation work herself, which can also speak to anxiety; before she's whisked away, one of her coworkers snaps that she ought to remember that she's not the only person working on the project, but Natsuko may well feel like she's the only person who she can truly trust. Her work is her life, and being brought to another world allows her to act on that belief and learn to trust others at least a little.

Although the episode takes a bit of time to truly get going (while still managing to seed the possibility that animators all over Japan are being taken to other worlds as a result of “food poisoning”), when it bursts into life, it's a moment of jaw-dropping glory. The animation for Natsuko learning her power is exquisite, and the artistic choices drive home her profession and the power of animation as a medium. The dub is excellent, and I think I may even like it better than the sub - the unicorn character is far less irritating in English, and Madeleine Morris is fantastic as Natsuko. Even if you're sick and tired of isekai, this one stands to defy your expectations. Please give it at least this first episode, especially if you've ever rewritten an ending.

One of the traps that isekai stories fall into is rushing their beginnings. While, of course, the main character needs to get isekai-ed, and we need to get a bit of action in the first episode, we also need to be made to care about the main character—or watching them interact with the fantasy world is meaningless on an emotional level. Luckily, ZENSHU. shows that their main character, Natsuko, is more than a blank-slate audience proxy.

Natsuko is a woman suffering from her unexpected success. With an upwardly mobile career and a huge anime hit under her belt, everyone is expecting the moon from her in her next work. The problem is that the more she tries to live up to her legend, the more she fears that she can't. It's not that she has writer's block but rather that she can see the defects in her work—and if she can tell that they aren't perfect, surely everyone else would be able to do so.

This has also led to her becoming a control freak. If anyone else on the anime project makes a mistake, she, as the director, would be held responsible in the public eye. Thus, she refuses to delegate and cannot give up any control. Or, to put it another way, she is stuck, and both she and her studio are suffering for it. For anyone who has had expectations of greatness placed upon them, this is undoubtedly a situation you can empathize with.

The other great aspect of this anime is the twist on the isekai genre—i.e., being transported not into a game or bog-standard fantasy but rather into an incomprehensibly bad anime world. While Natsuko is a fan of the anime the world is based on, she is well aware that it is schlock—and enjoys it for the chaos it represents. In a real way, it is the opposite of what people expect of her work. It's a failure on every level that has been dismissed and forgotten about—and now she has to live in it.

Even with all this show has going for it, I don't think I'd have continued watching it if it weren't for the episode's action climax. The Nausicaä-inspired god soldier drawn in raw keyframes was such a cool visualization that it blew my socks off. The unexpected spectacle has me sold on this series—at least for a few more episodes. It deserves that much.

My anticipation for ZENSHU was based on exactly one thing: the team-up between Mitsue Yamazaki and Kimiko Ueno, two of the top female creative voices in anime who consistently turn out some excellent work. Yamazaki's direction turned the very-good comedies Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun and Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle into gut-busting appointment viewing, and while Ueno's original work has been hit or miss, Delicious in Dungeon and Ranma ½ have bought her more than enough goodwill. I didn't need to know anything else – just those two names.

I didn't go in blind – I knew it was about a female anime director! Which, coming from a studio with a reputation like MAPPA's… eh. But if I were to refuse to engage with any anime made under subpar conditions, it would seriously impede my role as a critic. Plus, protagonist Natsuko Hirose was certainly created with an awareness of how terrible an anime studio's working environment can be. She's a perfectionist monster, refusing to allow anyone else to work on the storyboards for her new movie even when the premiere date is at risk and sending back all the keyframes for the PV to be corrected without giving any more specific instructions for the animators. When someone tries to point out that a lot of people's hard work goes into creating anime, the atmosphere becomes so tense he pretends he is yelling at a random staff member. She brings to mind all the stories about the high-stress environment at Studio Ghibli; I wouldn't be surprised to learn this is a common quality for directors.

We have a skilled, unlikable adult female protagonist… so naturally, she gets isekai'd. Forget Truck-kun, now we get Rotten Clam-chan. She ends up in Tale of Perishing, a critical and box office flop she fell in love with as a child. But the characters are hostile from the outset, and knowing the story in advance doesn't seem to help. While the show isn't a comedy exactly, Yamazaki's skill with timing and body language comes through loud and clear as Natsuko butts heads with the heroes who drove her to get into animation. After all, she's weird and abrasive; it only makes sense that she doesn't get along with people.

ZENSHU is beautifully animated, skillfully directed, and well-written. Hop on this one.

I picked ZENSHU. as one of my most anticipated anime of this upcoming season, and I am happy to report that its premiere did not disappoint. Sure, I would have loved to have seen more of our heroine Natsuko's life in the anime industry before she hilariously offed herself by eating a disgusting bento of old, stinky clams, but there's always the chance that we might get to see more of the real-world stuff in future episodes. Besides, I'm happy enough to be this excited to watch a show about an overworked twentysomething who dies at their desk and is subsequently reincarnated into the world of their favorite fantasy anime. So long as it can continue to execute this well on such a worn-out premise, I'll consider everything else it gets right on top of that to be a nice little bonus.

If anything, ZENSHU. stands as proof that there isn't really any setup that is too tired or cliche to pull off, so long as the creativity and passion are evident in every other element of the show. ZENSHU. has certainly got the production values to make it worth watching purely as a nice work of animation, which is all the more important considering that the show is about a control-freak perfectionist who draws for a living. Before anyone says anything, yes, I recognize the inextricable irony of rooting for a show like this to stay consistently good-looking when it is being produced by Studio MAPPA, a company that is infamous for exploiting its workers to achieve those exact results, which is really saying something when you consider how bad the situation generally is at a baseline level for the entire industry. Still, a cartoon about the joy of bringing stories and characters to life through this incredible medium of animation does need to look the part, you know what I mean?

So far as Crunchyroll's English dub for ZENSHU. is concerned, the key role in the production is obviously that of Natsuko, since she carries the entire story on her shoulders (along with an ungodly amount of hair). Thankfully, Madeleine Morris is more than up for the task, giving the character all of the caustic attitude needed to show how she ended up the way she is while also never losing sight of her innocent fangirl charm. More importantly, I think, is that Morris' performance sounds very grounded and, for lack of a better term, like a real person. This is in contrast to Ryan Negron's performance as Luke for example, which is appropriately hammy and melodramatic, since he and all of the other fantasy characters are meant to come from an in- universe anime. If Natsuko just sounded like your average antisocial anime girl, the contrast between her life in our world and her new one in A Tale of Perishing wouldn't work. With its capable lead performances and solid localization choices, though, ZENSHU.'s dub definitely does work. I could see this being a show that I actually prefer watching in English, since it makes it easier to appreciate all of the artistry on display from MAPPA.

The point is, though, that ZENSHU. does indeed look the part, and its charismatic direction (courtesy of Mitsue Yamazaki) goes such a long way toward breathing life into this dusty old sub-genre. A perfect example is how the show handles Natsuko herself. At first, while I thought her Sadako-esque overgrown hairdo was funny, I was worried that the gag would wear out its welcome and make the character harder to relate to as a real person. The climax of this first episode proved me wrong, however, when her magical isekai powers manifest as an extension of the artistry to which she has already dedicated her life, and we see her face emblazoned with the furious passion that must have made her such a wunderkind in her previous life. It's an incredible moment, and it almost single-handedly elevated an already fun premiere into an episode that had its hooks in me completely. Bring on the next episode, already!