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When I first sat down to watch Zenshu, I was expecting a grounded narrative exploring Hirose Natsuko’s burnout and creative struggles as an animator.
Imagine my surprise when, following her untimely demise via questionable seafood, she found herself not just escaping her reality but literally transported into her favorite childhood anime.
At first glance, this screamed generic isekai, and I admit I groaned a little, fearing it might fall into the predictable tropes of the genre. But Zenshu deftly swerved into something far more fascinating.
The anime opens by introducing Hirose, a successful young anime director struggling with her latest project.
The news of a fellow animator’s death by food poisoning turns out to be a heavy handed foreshadowing as things take a bizarre turn when Hirose herself succumbs to a similar fate while rewatching her childhood favorite, A Tale of Perishing.
She awakens not in the afterlife, but within the anime itself, encountering its characters: Luke Braveheart, Memmeln, Unio, and QJ.
The animation, as expected from MAPPA, is visually stunning with clean art and compelling character designs.
However, the action sequences didn’t click, atleast in the first episode, making me wonder if the animation quality would drop off eventually.
This concern was quickly dispelled when we came to the scene where Hirose, realizing she still possesses her animator’s tools, is urged by them to draw.
This is where Zenshu truly distinguishes itself – both in animation quality and also the concept.
The sequence was a treat for the eyes. MAPPA really went all out there! However, recent bad experiences have shown us that judging an anime’s production quality just from its first episode would be a gross mistake.
Hirose wields her animator’s tools like a godly paintbrush, rewriting the narrative of her childhood obsession. That is her superpower. This fictional world turned out to be a canvas that just stoked her and broke through her creative block.
Her ability to alter the world through her drawings is delightfully meta. It’s not simply a character transported to another world; it’s as if a creator has been transported to their own creation.
Is this really an isekai? Or is it a narrative which would touch upon the topics of creation and control?
The episode also raises several intriguing questions. The heavy-handed foreshadowing of Hirose’s death by food poisoning, mirroring the fate of the director of A Tale of Perishing, feels deliberate. It’s hard to believe that this was simply a bizarre coincidence.
It is entirely possible that there is a deeper mystery is at play here and we might end up meeting more characters who have crossed over to the other side in the future episodes.
Furthermore, we are only beginning to glimpse Natsuko’s psyche. Her creative block and inexperience with love were shown to hinder her new romance movie.
Also, we get hints that A Tale of Perishing profoundly impacted Natsuko, serving as both an escape and a source of something deeper. It seems as if she is yearning to correct something deeply personal overall, and I believe her character arc, littered with flashbacks to her past self, is going to be very heavy hitting.
Hirose’s presence in this world seems symbolic to me. She’s given a chance to redo a story she cherishes, mirroring her own desire to probably rewrite her creative and emotional self. Just as the world of A Tale of Perishing is perishing and waiting for her touch to rebuild it, so is Hirose.
This is where the title, “Zenshu” (meaning redoing everything), gains significance. Our main character is not just transported to this world; she’s there to rewrite it, to complete it in a way she couldn’t before.
And because of all this, I feel that Zenshu will be more about the personal struggles of Hirose, rather than your isekai worldbuilding and power-scaling story.
We will see her rewrite moments in the story which impacted her the most, and in a way save herself through this journey. Is there a coming back for her from this world. Is she in a coma in the real world? We don’t know.
Anyways, episode 2 couldn’t come any sooner for me. I am totally looking forward to the journey of our anneemator from the country known as ‘Real World’.
©全修。／MAPPA
