ZENSHU.

Episodes 1-2

ZENSHU could be the series I've been aching for for a long time. Like many other anime for the last decade or so, it's an isekai. However, unlike the LitRPG series that fans enjoy as time to turn off their brain and indulge in some unchallenging fantasy, it bears a greater resemblance to the ones that made me an anime fan: a female protagonist who is transferred to another world that channels her anxieties and struggles, giving her an opportunity to grow past them. Even better, this one features an adult woman: Natsuko Hirose, a popular anime director suffering from a creative block when she eats an expired clam and finds herself in the world of Tale of Perishing, a dark fantasy anime that she loved as a child.

Natsuko is exciting as a heroine to me because she feels like a maturation of Miaka, Hitomi, Youko, and so on – while she's no longer a child, she still suffers from plenty of anxieties and insecurities because, well, that's life. She was a nightmare to work with, touchy and making unreasonable demands of her staff even as she struggled to come up with storyboards for her new movie, a grounded romance. Since the first episode has come out, many people have made the connection between her harsh expectations for her animators and MAPPA's reputation as a toxic work environment. I don't feel like I can fully comment on them without making massive assumptions about the intent and process behind ZENSHU; all I know is that director and writer Mitsue Yamazaki and Kimiko Ueno, two highly respected female creatives in the anime industry, are credited as the original creators and have done some work for MAPPA in the last few years.

Natsuko is pulled into the world of Tale of Perishing, an anime movie she saw as a child. Although it was critically panned for being confusing and dark, it clearly had a deep influence on her. To a certain generation of anime fans, Tale of Perishing is an obvious pastiche of '80's anime, from Memerun's Deedlit-esque pauldrons to Unio's resemblance to Unico, an anime I first watched when I was all of three years old. The characters naturally regard her with suspicion – her long dark hair in front of her face makes it impossible for them to tell that she's human, and her warnings about what's coming seem implausible.

When the Void attacks, Natsuko seems powerless to prevent the movie's first major character death: Unio sacrificing himself by performing a self-destruct spell. However, when her pegbar speaks to her, she has a magical girl transformation, summoning her animation desk and drawing on the God Warrior from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to eliminate the threat.

Afterwards, the elder Baobab recruits her to join the Nine Soldiers, the group charged with protecting the final remaining Soul Future from the Void and preventing the world's destruction. The leader of the Soldiers and hero of the story, Luke, objects – being a misogynist is part of his character description, and he sees women as frivolous gossips. Natsuko herself has reservations, because she can only use her power when it calls upon her rather than the other way around. Without it, she's totally useless in a fight.

Despite her and Luke's objections, she must assist in the fight against the Void, this time coming in the form of countless flying insects. When she tries to summon the God Warrior again, her pegbar tells her she can't reuse ideas - “No stock footage!” After wracking her brain, she sits down and draws an Itano Circus, the signature action style of legendary animator and director Ichirō Itano consisting of the camera zooming and swooping along as it tracks the movement of dozens of missiles.

This sequence was notably storyboarded by Itano himself, his first animation work in nearly a decade. It speaks toward ZENSHU's reverence for the work of the '80's, a time when the anime industry was evolving rapidly thanks to the bubble economy and bursting with experimental animation and storytelling as it shifted from a children's medium to something that served all ages and could focus on darker topics. The world of Tale of Perishing even deliberately resembles animation of the cel era, rather than today's high-gloss digital productions. Although it's too early to say for sure, one of the themes could very well be Natsuko looking back on what made her fall in love with the medium and finding inspiration in her roots as a fan, further suggested by the imagery of her at different ages sitting in an otherwise-empty theater, watching Tale of Perishing.

One thing I'm curious about is how it's all going to connect back to the initial conflict: Natsuko's difficulty with directing a grounded high school romance. So far everything she's drawn from is science fiction and fantasy action. These are great for splashy, exciting sakuga sequences, but Natsuko's trouble is that she has no frame of reference for how to capture the feeling of falling in love. I want to believe that everything will tie back together thematically, since one of the things I love about older shojo isekai was the way they often functioned as metaphors as a coming of age story and how the story threads tend to tie back to the heroine's mental state. I could see a romance blossoming between Natsuko and Luke, but how will that be filtered through Natsuko's powers?

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