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Zenshu Episodes 2 & 3 cement the satire of anime and their creators as a hilarious allegory for fandom and artistry that's unique this year.
Posted in: Crunchyroll, Review, TV | Tagged: anime, isekai, mappa studio, Zenshu
Zenshu Eps. 2 & 3 Continues The Wackiest Isekai's Comedy Streak
Zenshu Episodes 2 & 3 cement the satire of anime and their creators as a hilarious allegory for fandom and artistry that's unique this year.
Zenshu is the one standout isekai anime right out of an overcrowded genre. These days, you can't look at a manga, light novel, or anime streaming list without a whole bunch of isekai series falling on you like tribbles tumbling out of a starship grain storage. Isekai is a knowing power fantasy, usually written by men, where a gamer ends up in the fantasy world of this favourite game and uses his knowledge of the rules and hacks to achieve god mode to become a hero or even a god. An isekai series has to have a good enough new twist to stand out, and Zenshu is a gleeful meta spoof of the genre, the fantasy genre, the anime industry, and fandom itself from a snarky female point of view.
The heroine of Zenshu is animator and geek Natsuko Hirose, an antisocial workaholic who croaked from eating bad clams and ends up in the fantasy world of her favourite anime movie of all time, "A Tale of Perishing". Episodes 2 and 3 start to establish the rest of the cast and set-up of the world as Natsuko has figured out she might be dead, and this is her afterlife, or maybe she could get out of here if she saves this world and prevents the tragic fate that doomed the heroes and the people. Natsuko goes between snarking about the tropes and clichés in the story and fangirling over the characters and world design that's been etched in her memory since childhood.
The jokes continue to come thick and fast. The creators can't resist still hiding her face behind her hair like Sadako from The Ring and directly referencing those J-Horror visuals for laughs. The story is also inherently aware of the incongruence of the cute fairytale vibe of "A Tale of Perishing" with the traumatic deaths and tragedies that ended the original version Natsuko grew up on; that's a weird tradition in Japanese anime. Natsuko's whole arc has her preventing all the doom and sadness that messed her up in the first place. Episode 3 also introduced the princess, which is a common trope in Japanese anime, a well-meaning airhead who keeps making situations worse before Natsuko changes the story again by turning her towards feminist independence. Isekai is about dominating the world of the main character's fantasy, but Zenshu subverts that theme by turning the story into an allegory for a creator who is rewriting the whole story one piece at a time with knowing in-jokes.
Zenshu: A Tale of Geekdom and Creation
Zenshu might be the funniest anime of this season with a unique point of view. Natsuko's magical girl superpower is creativity. She literally draws animation frames of characters and designs as a deus ex machina to defeat every monster that turns her magical girl transformation into a montage of her sitting at a magic cubicle, slaving away on all the frame drawings that bring an anime to life. It's the nuttiest goof on an animator's obsessive pace and compulsive workaholism because she literally can't rest until she's finished. The deus ex machina she draws to save the day in episode 3 is a superhero wrestler in a cat mask that's an homage to the classic Tiger Mask wrestler from manga and anime. It's a true and honest portrayal of the fan-turned-creator that's both funny and borderline tragic, which is the agony of every fan.
Zenshu is streaming on Crunchyroll.
Zenshu Episodes 2 & 3
9/10
Zenshu is the one standout isekai anime right out of an overcrowded genre. These days, you can't look at a manga, light novel, or anime streaming list without a whole bunch of isekai series falling on you like tribbles tumbling out of a starship grain storage. Isekai is a knowing power fantasy, usually written by men, where a gamer ends up in the fantasy world of this favourite game and uses his knowledge of the rules and hacks to achieve god mode to become a hero or even a god. An isekai series has to have a good enough new twist to stand out, and Zenshu is a gleeful meta spoof of the genre, the fantasy genre, the anime industry, and fandom itself from a snarky female point of view.
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