Official series synopsis: After graduating from 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.
Storyboard artist: Mitsue Yamazaki
Episode director: Sumie Noro
Screenwriter: Kimiko Ueno
If you’ve seen the subsequent trailers for ZENSHU, you’ll know that it isn’t quite Shirobako, but an isekai story where the protagonist enters the world of an anime. Main character Natsuko is a young star director — although this first episode, titled “FIRST STROKE,” does better at showing her current ineptitude than convincingly portraying her rapid rise to success — and when she ends up in the fantasy anime film A Tale of Perishing, she brings with her the power of storyboarding.
There are two big problems plaguing ZENSHU’s premiere, and the first is its main character. While it’s only natural for Natsuko to be flawed to enable the premise described by the synopsis, the episode makes it hard to want to continue seeing her on-screen at all. After a staff member (presumably a production assistant) hands her key frames for checking, Natsuko nonchalantly asks for a full retake (zenshu, the very word that serves as the show’s title) and would rather take on the task herself than provide any feedback. Having an asshole character (or a character who starts off as one) is perfectly fine, but the premiere doesn’t offer more than that — no sympathetic angle, no special quality, no twisted self-justification for her current temperament— so my first impression of Natsuko is that she’s neither interesting nor hateable but entertaining. She’s just annoying.
It doesn’t take long for Natsuko to get isekaied by choking on food, which spares us from having to watch her continue to be a nuisance to the anime production team she’s meant to lead, Alas, the isekai show we get in return isn’t a fantastic trade, which is the second problem. Since the premiere doesn’t do anything to make Natsuko endearing beyond showing her early interest in anime, I struggled to care about her suddenly being in a world where she could be killed by monsters. The episode itself fails to portray this as a truly serious predicament, and Natsuko’s character doesn’t become more watchable with the scenery change.
This would mean that the hero’s party in A Tale of Perishing has to pick up the slack, but ZENSHU’s first episode doesn’t provide a strong reason to feel invested in the fantasy characters, who are also burdened by unmemorable character designs and a unicorn who looks like they are from another anime entirely. Because of that, Natsuko’s knowledge of the dark aspects of A Tale of Perishing’s story doesn’t succeed in being a source of tension.
Another issue with the isekai aspect at the moment is the lack of pull that A Tale of Perishing’s world possesses. Its prophesized heroes, evil monsters, and character design style make it feel like a fantasy JRPG setting (making this the rare case where I wish an isekai story had inexplicable game-like mechanics), but it so far lacks any point of interest beyond that faint association.
Although there are ruined structures and a background soldier’s comment that there is only one city left standing, the episode’s story composition and execution — and ZENSHU’s general aesthetic — fail to conjure a tone that befits the state of A Tale of Perishing’s setting. There’s no earnest effort to actually make us care about the survival of that last city, and the character design clash between Natsuko and A Tale of Perishing’s inhabitants makes for a further lack of immersion. It doesn’t matter that the animation and background art in ZENSHU’s premiere are mostly quite good, because the overall experience lacks a laudable personality, and even the action sequences fail to provide spikes of enjoyment.
ZENSHU‘s personality doesn’t get better when it’s time for Natsuko to use her currently unexplained magic-like storyboarding power, which amusingly comes with a henshin-esque sequence that is one of the episode’s rare bright spots (ignoring the bizarre decision to have cheery chants of “zenshu” in the background). I won’t spoil the exact details, but Natsuko summons something that looks like a clear reference to a being from a classic anime movie. Making references to another anime itself isn’t an issue, but when your main character is an anime director struggling to come up with storyboard ideas, it might be better to have more originality for her big moment — although the lack of it might diegetically explain how Natsuko drew her magical storyboards in record time.
At this point, the only aspect I feel capable of praising other than the lavishly animated henshin is Natsuko’s character design. Her Sadako-like “hair-over-face” style makes her off-putting in a way that fits her character — you can assume that she does it to both put up a wall between herself and her colleagues and to avoid facing the reality of her movie’s production — and her face, when revealed, looks many times better than those of the A Tale of Perishing characters.
It isn’t impossible that ZENSHU might improve and eventually provide an arresting story with strong character writing and development for everyone, while somehow tying Natsuko’s fantasy world experience with her rom-com movie-making issues (why the story didn’t send her into a romance anime really is a mystery) in a satisfactory manner. However, the first episode of the anime makes it difficult to carry such hopes. The initial impression of its characters is weak, the setup of its isekai story lackluster, and the reliance of Natsuko’s first power display on another work’s achievement is not a good cherry to have on top of that. It’s a premiere that struggles to nail the sales pitch for both its isekai aspect and anime director protagonist gimmick, and while I’m curious about the trajectory Natsuko’s journey will take in the following episodes, I’m not very motivated to follow it with my own eyes..
ZENSHU is streaming on Crunchyroll.
Series staff
• Director: Mitsue Yamazaki (Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle)
• Assistant director: Sumie Noro (Saint Cecilia and Pastor Lawrence director)
• Series composer and screenwriter: Kimiko Ueno (Delicious in Dungeon series composer)
• Character designer and co-chief animation director: Kayoko Ishikawa (Sarazanmai)
• Creator: Mitsue Yamazaki
• Creator: Kimiko Ueno
• Creator: MAPPA
• Original character designer and environment concept artist: Yoshiteru Tsujino (character designer for various Tengai Makyo games)
• Music composer: Yukari Hashimoto (A Sign of Affection)
• Animation Producer: Takahiro Ogawa (Bucchigiri?!, Campfire Cooking in Another World with my Absurd Skill)
• Animation production: MAPPA
