No one in the year of our lord 2025 is going to argue it’s easy to make an anime. It’s perhaps a more straightforward process than it’s ever been in human history, but the artistry and imagination of it still requires a lot. Dive just a little bit into the background of any of your favorite shows and you’re liable to find tight timelines, overworked animators, and a whole load of personal opinions on whether the show is even good enough to warrant all this fuss.
Zenshu knows this pain acutely, even if its protagonist, Natsuko Hirose, feels she is immune to it. She’s been driving toward being not just an anime director, but a virtuoso. Her ability to draw fast and well quickly lands her at the helm of her first feature — only to end up overworked and eventually dying from food poisoning. Except she’s not really dead; she wakes up in A Tale of Perishing, her favorite anime from childhood, where she has the ability to magically draw figures that come to life to fight off enemies.
The show pulls no punches about what being a workaholic animator has done to Natsuko’s life and psyche. When we meet her in the beginning, she’s an anime protagonist by way of The Addams Family’s Cousin Itt, with hair constantly covering her face. She’s so burnt out, frustrated, and blocked that the battles of a feudal fantasy world feel like a reprieve. But Zenshu is a show that is about love and care, however sublimated. And across the 12 episodes of its first season, it never settles for being just a typical isekai adventure.
Sure, the show could certainly have enough fun with its core concept to carry it for years. The Nine Soldiers, the main protagonists of A Tale of Perishing, are a fun bunch, and Natsuko’s otherworldly disruption of their adventure would be enough to power an adventure show for a while. The creators of Zenshu clearly have a good time poking fun at ’90s anime tropes, whether it’s Natsuko’s magical girl transformation sweeping the hair out of her eyes and landing her at a desk, or her inadvertently inspiring a bimbo babe to become jacked.
But by the end, these ideas get pulled together to something much more formidable and compelling than it might appear at first. Across its back half, Zenshu’s run of episodes moves from looking at how Natsuko’s drive to become a prolific animator (based on her die-hard affection for A Tale of Perishing) led her to live her life with blinders on to an epic battle among the Nine Soldiers. In a lesser show, these might feel like disparate extremes. But with Zenshu, the build felt perfect. Each battle leveled up the action and the stakes (and looked great while doing so), giving us another notch of Natsuko opening herself up to the people around her beyond being just a source of inspiration. Before she knows it, she’s tangled up in the lives of those around her — and all the better for it.
Image: MAPPA/Crunchyroll
In that way, Zenshu works on several levels of story. The main story is charming, and it’s neat watching the entire show use that to quietly push Natsuko through her creative blocks, as her magic becomes more complicated to use; she not only has to avoid recreating shapes but push through creations that get weaponized against her. Again: Making anime is hard work! And Zenshu never forgets the value in making our hero experience art rather than just simply creating it. The creative disconnect she had before she died — what the “ba-dump” love moment should feel like in her film — gets answered when she finally gets out of her own head long enough to experience it herself. When characters die or get threatened, Natsuko moves from ironic detachment to being openly moved. It’s cute that “the real creative verve was the friends we made along the way,” but Zenshu lets these moments feel true and earned; there’s a believable shift in Natsuko’s inner world over the course of the series that compels her to finally respond to the outer one.
In many ways Zenshu feels like a love letter to anime, its fans, and all the delicious pain and imagination that comes with creating it. Was her adventure real? A dream? Some sort of fanfiction? Who knows; the ending — which, bittersweetly, seems pretty final on screen — is delightfully clipped. But the story persists anyway, whether Natsuko “really” changed it canonically or not. And it changed her, too. Her passion for the movie alters the course of her life time and time again: It propels her to become a creator, to obsess and hone her skills, to find connections. It only makes sense that, at the end of the remarkably self-contained season, it prompts her to find healthier and happier relationships to both work and those around her, too. There’s some encouragement to all of us, anime creators and consumers alike, to slow down and appreciate what makes life feel worth it.
As the show pulls back the curtain on Natsuko’s specific struggles, it makes it all the more impressive how much fun Zenshu is. It looks great, whether it’s the bombastic fantasy action or the sketchy, colorful magic that seems to glimmer off the screen. There’s dynamic action and slow-boil romance, nuggets of wisdom and, ultimately, a splendidly ambitious story. It is a love letter to how impossible anime can feel from all sides of it — and how much a true labor of love can feel like magic in the end.
Zenshu is now streaming on Crunchyroll.
Content shared from www.polygon.com.