AWN’s anime columnist Andrew Osmond looks at MAPPA’s comedy fantasy, one of the best shows currently streaming, now on Crunchyroll; but first he discusses the often mis-identified universe of TV anime.
This week, I’ll look at a new TV anime, Zenshu, currently streaming on Crunchyroll. In the way of this column, though, I’ll start by talking about TV anime more broadly. (But before that, a shout-out to AWN’s superb interview with the director of another new TV anime, Sakamoto Days, conducted by Victoria Davis)
TV or not TV?
Like many countries, Japan makes the most of its animation “for” television. Or does it? I’m in Japan now. A moment ago, I flipped through some of this week’s anime, but not on TV. I watched the anime on my laptop via two free, legal video websites, Nico Nico and Abema TV.
As you might expect, these sites only stream these episodes in Japan. Neither site specializes in anime like Crunchyroll, which isn’t accessible in Japan. Rather, Nico Nico and Abema TV offer anime in an ocean of multimedia. Note to foreigners: these sites aren’t English-subtitled.
And yet, these new anime are still serialized week by week, as they were 60 years ago. Moreover, the new anime are still shown on Japan’s terrestrial television as well, among all the other formats. Admittedly, their terrestrial TV showings are mostly tucked away in the dead of night, “watched” mostly by digital recorders. But for the purposes of this article, I’ll still call them TV anime.
When anime was for kids
Defining TV anime was less tricky when it began in the 1950s with animated commercials, followed by TV series from the 1960s. Up to the 2000s, most TV anime was either made for children, or at least for timeslots when children might see it.
That might startle some readers, given anime’s long-standing reputation for violence and “adult” content. Partly it’s because the extreme anime exports were never made for TV. They were cinema films, or straight-to-video anime for adults, including serialized titles that one might mistake for TV anime.
Then again, it’s entirely true that Japan historically has very different standards of acceptable TV content from other countries. I have a Japanese friend who remembers how his 1980s childhood viewing included Shame on Miss Machiko, a lewd comedy cartoon. Machiko is a hapless young woman, teaching at an elementary school. Her underwear is constantly exposed for comedic purposes, often by the little boys she’s teaching. The show ran 95 episodes.
A better-known example is Fist of the North Star, even though it’s subject to the kind of confusion I mentioned just before. When fans refer to the title, they’re often not thinking of the TV version (available on Crunchyroll) but of a far gorier, never-for-kids, cinema anime version. Still, the original series can startle newcomers. Its hero’s much-memed catchphrase is “You’re already dead!” as he leaves hulking heavies to blow apart in gouts of white fire.
Fist of the North Star was made by Toei Animation, Japan’s largest and oldest studio, which animates giant franchises including One Piece and Sailor Moon. In 2012, I interviewed Hidenori Oyama, who was Toei’s Senior Director at the time. He told me the Japanese audience for the TV Fist of the North Star ranged “from 6 to 30, from elementary schoolkids to working adults.”
This was the same series that was screened on a French children’s variety TV show (Club Dorothée), where it caused a barrage of parental protests, and fueled a furious campaign against anime imports by a politician, Ségolène Royal.
And yet, contrary to some beliefs, it was never true that anything went in TV anime. As late as 1995, Neon Genesis Evangelion got into trouble with the network screening it in primetime. The reason: an artfully suggestive scene of two consenting adults in bed. In 2003, another primetime science-fiction anime, Gundam Seed, was criticized for sexual suggestions by Japan’s Commission for Better Broadcasting.
But by then, most primetime anime was on its way out anyway.
Into the night
Television anime now is very different. While anime is still largely watched by fairly young adults, often under 30, most of it is removed from timeslots where children might be watching. Anime’s migration to late-night TV began long ago – one early case was Cowboy Bebop in 1998.
Today, primetime anime are rare in Japan, barring two seemingly never-ending family sitcoms on Sundays: Sazae-san and Chibi Maruko-chan. Sazae-san started in 1969, and is the longest-running TV cartoon in the world. It isn’t streamed in America, but 30 Chibi Maruko-chan episodes can be found on Crunchyroll.
Even a giant like One Piece can’t withstand the late-night migration anymore. Like Fist of the North Star, One Piece is made by Toei, aimed at viewers from preteens to adults. For nearly 25 years, it was shown in early evening and Sunday morning slots. Now it will move to 11:15 p.m. this April.
It’s tempting to compare this shift to what happened in another country to a different medium. I’m thinking of… American superhero comics. Decades ago, they were part of mainstream pop-culture. Then they shifted into a specialist niche and transmogrified into a fan-oriented cult. Anime has taken a similar course. Except I’d argue it hasn’t essentially changed, much less than hero comics.
There are still many late-night anime that you can imagine being shown in primetime slots decades ago. For instance, there’s the hit action-comedy series Spy x Family, or the wide-eyed future adventure show Dr. Stone. Perhaps the new hit Sakamoto Days would need to be a little less bloody for primetime, but there’s little to separate its comedy-violence from Lupin the Third in the 1970s.
The wolves in sheep’s clothing
However, I’m most fascinated by today’s late-night anime which are wolves in sheep’s clothing. These shows begin indistinguishably from upbeat, family-friendly series. Then, after a few episodes, they slowly move into violent, horrific, anguished territory. Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011) is a classic case, about young girls being given magical powers. From there, the story develops into a frilly-frocked Faust. Then there’s Made in Abyss (began 2016), about kids on an underground journey, where Miyazaki-esque wonder merges with sickening horror.
What fascinates me is how these shows don’t have the satirical instincts of American adult cartoons, of Family Guy or Rick and Morty. They don’t mock the earnestness of older family anime. Rather, they draw on that earnestness. They’re revved-up versions of their predecessors, with eager, adventurous heroes fighting monsters who are frequently adults.
There’s an essential continuity between today’s late-night, adult-oriented TV anime and the primetime shows of 40 or 50 years ago. It’s quite unlike America, whose adult animation reacts against the tropes and values of past animation.
It also reflects why anime, even anime with expressly mature content, feel so remote from American adult animation. If you’ve seen Attack on Titan, Madoka Magica, or Death Note, imagine them remade with the outlook of The Simpsons or Rick and Morty. But you can’t imagine them like that, can you? They wouldn’t make sense. The Simpsons’ hilarious spoof of Death Note in 2023 only proved that point.
The shows that get here, the shows that don’t
As of writing, the three-month “Winter anime” TV season has just started in Japan this January. It’ll be followed by the spring anime season from April, the summer season from July, and the Fall season from October. Go to My Anime List, one of the top English-language anime sites, and you’ll find these seasons closely monitored – by fans, of course.
My Anime List (MAL) lists more than 100 weekly TV anime series screened in just this winter season, new or ongoing. Even if some of those series have episodes of a few minutes, that’s a staggering amount of material. More than 40 of the series are being currently streamed in America by Crunchyroll. Others are on different specialist sites such as HIDIVE, or on general video sites. Netflix, for instance, streams Sakamoto Days.
It’s worth highlighting some of the ongoing series which are not streamed in America, or in many other territories. As mentioned, the record-breaking Sazae-san isn’t streamed, and many Western fans probably haven’t heard of it. Two other long-runners are Crayon Shin-chan (began 1992 – think Rugrats but 100 times as scabrous), and the never-ending kids’ Doraemon (began 1973). The latter two shows extend far beyond TV, spinning off nearly eighty cinema features between them.
Foreign distributors judge that these series are unlikely to interest Western fans who didn’t grow up with them. Doraemon, for instance, is about a grade-school boy and his robot cat ally, whose madcap adventures are embedded in Japanese daily life. It’s surpassed 2,500 episodes and outlived more than one of its main voice-cast, but it’s still missed off My Anime List’s season guide.
Zenshu
Zenshu, the TV anime I’m highlighting this week, is streaming internationally on Crunchyroll. On the one hand, it has extremely (and knowingly) generic elements that anime fans will recognize immediately. On the other hand, Zenshu’s more interesting because it’s about an animator and the animation process. It’s also funny enough to transcend its genre and could have been a primetime anime if they still existed.
The series tells the story of a woman animation director, Natsuko, in modern Japan. Like many anime maestros, she does more than direct; she draws the storyboards and insists on correcting any key animation which dissatisfies her. She’s frantically working on her new feature film when she has a (seemingly) fatal reaction to a snack that’s passed its sell-by date.
After collapsing in her studio, she wakes up in the middle of a fantasy world… but more interestingly, it’s also the middle of an anime film which Natsuko adored as a child. (Perhaps disappointingly, the film is imagined for the series, though there’s always the chance of a future spinoff where we see it in full.) Natsuko meets the assorted multi-species heroes, who are of course familiar to her. “Ask me how much I spent trying to get your key-chain!” she snaps at a bipedal boy-unicorn.
But Natsuko finds she has a unique superpower – as an animator. As times of crisis, she can summon an artist’s desk from air and create creatures and objects at super-speed to destroy monsters. These sequences are the designated visual highlights, as she summons pencil-drawn entities, half-shaded in glorious freehand, into the world.
The sequence that actually shows her frantically drawing is also whizzily spontaneous; it’s like a high-sugared Saturday-morning cartoon with a quality splurge. But many fans will immediately get the joke, even the first time around. This particular sequence will be recycled again and again through successive episodes, like the elaborate scenes of girls transforming or robots launching in anime of yesteryear.
Still, it doesn’t mar the thrill of seeing animation celebrated in animation. It’s not unprecedented – the recent film Look Back, about budding manga artists, does something comparable, as does Masaaki Yuasa’s bubbly series Keep Your Hands Off Eizokuen!, about animation students. On a more adult level, there’s the excellent anime workplace drama Shirobako, about the believable pressures of working in a Tokyo animation studio. But Zenshu takes the idea fantastically forward.
Its animation is by the top-tier MAPPA studio, responsible for action spectacles including Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man. Zenshu is nowhere near as good-looking as them (the lackluster music also disappoints), but the tentpole “creation” sequences give us something to anticipate each week
Natsuko is also a genuinely funny series lead, mostly hidden behind her curtain of uncut hair. She’s reasonably adult by anime standards and amusingly annoyed at being flung into this adventure. Zenshu’s original story (not based on a comic or another source) is co-credited to scriptwriter Kimiko Ueno, who I interviewed a decade ago. Back then, she mentioned she was not “good with those anime with girls being all girly.” The truculent, peevish Natsuko is surely more her type.
Zenshu is a decent entry-level anime for people who haven’t seen much of the medium. But it also has hilariously geeky jokes inside the magic creation scenes. For example, the first creature Natsuko creates should look familiar to anyone who’s seen the early films of Hayao Miyazaki. That’s funny enough, but it’s even funnier if you know it’s referencing a specific bit of animation by a hungry young animator who suffered infamously for his art. I won’t give away the joke here, but after you see the episode, look up the reference.
