Look, we all know about Mappa's practices and how awful they are. Underpaying their animators, forcing them to work 24/7, making them sign NDAs that force them to not talk about how bad working conditions are, taking on too much work than they can feasibly handle, not bothering to promote anything that's not their big shounen stuff, not protecting animators from harassment, not getting stuff done on time, and other stuff I probably don't know about. I mean, churning out a two-hour movie within four months? That's just horrifying. I don't blame anyone for wanting to jump ship, and Manabu Otsuka absolutely needs to be held accountable for treating the people working under him like garbage. So when news dropped that they were making an original anime focused on an animator a la Shirobako, people were understandably put off, thinking that this was in really bad taste in light of their shenanigans behind the scenes. I mainly just thought "Really, Mappa? You're really doing this? You really have no self-awareness, do you?" So I was fully intent on skipping Zenshu, thinking it was going to just be a Shirobako rip-off. But it turned out that it wasn't even trying to be like Shirobako at all, and other than focusing on animators, that's where their similarities end. I was not expecting to like Zenshu, and I sure am glad I gave it a shot.

Natsuko Hirose is an animator hot off the success of a show she directed, and has been picked to direct a new feature film. But there's several problems with this: Natsuko's been tasked to work on a romantic comedy, and she's never experienced romance before, not to mention being an arrogant perfectionist who insists on doing everything herself. While struggling with the storyboards, she gets food poisoning from eating a bad clam and...wakes up in another world. She later realizes that the world she's in is actually her favorite movie, A Tale of Perishing, the movie that inspired her to get into animation in the first place. Not only that, the pegbar she took with her by accident is magic and makes anything she draws come to life, albeit she can't draw the same thing more than once. With this new power in hand, she works side by side with the heroes she admired to alter the tragic storyline and bring hope to the world of the anime that inspired her to go into animation as a child.

So yeah, this is an isekai, and not your typical wish fulfillment self-insert power fantasy aimed at men. Zenshu deliberately borrows from the shoujo-oriented isekai anime of the 90s such as Fushigi Yuugi, Magic Knight Rayearth, and Twelve Kingdoms, where the isekai were much more about coming of age stories full of politics, intrigue, world-building, and character development. Not only that, Zenshu uses the isekai genre to explore themes such as creativity and what the act of doing so can mean to people, and is a critique of power fantasies through its main character trying to fix the movie she likes. Zenshu isn't exactly breaking any new ground with this, but in this current era where isekai anime are just seen as easy content to consume, it's honestly really refreshing. I don't know if any of this was intentional on series director Mitsue Yamazaki's part, but if you ask me, she did a bang up job with what she and her team created. Also, I'm kinda happy they didn't have Natsuko die from overwork, because in light of Mappa's horrid working conditions, that would have been in horribly bad taste even for them.

Man, all this praise and I haven't even talked about the animation yet. Zenshu boasts a bright, vibrant color palette and fluid, dynamic animation that really brings it to life, but what really impressed me were Natsuko's sentient drawings, all of which are intentionally made with shaky pencil sketches that are constantly flickering, complete with the red and blue colored pencil strokes that animators use to note shading. There was some CGI used in there, usually for the Void monsters, but they felt well-integrated enough that they didn't clash with the 2D animation too much. Mappa, I hope to God you didn't overwork your animators for this show, though knowing you, I'm betting you probably have, and I have nothing but respect for all the people who put their hearts and souls into this. I have less to say about the soundtrack. It's fine, but not all that memorable, and I wasn't a fan of both the opening and ending themes. They were both a little too hard rock for my tastes, but that's just me.

Being an isekai that's more reminiscent of the shoujo-oriented ones from the 90s, there is more of an emphasis on character development here, with the bulk of it going to its lead character, Natsuko. Whether you like her or not, Natsuko carries this entire series on her back, and arguably, I feel she's the best character in the whole show. Zenshu uses the isekai template to examine Natsuko's flaws and flesh her out as a character throughout the narrative, showing that her perfectionism and refusal to work with others have caused problems, not to mention dealing with the problems of being an animator in Japan and all that comes with it. Being transported to another world doesn't magically fix them. Rather, they come with her and the world just brings them to the forefront. This is the problem with a lot of the current isekai that are more about wish fulfillment power fantasies: Their characters are never challenged on their views, nor are they ever forced to grow and learn from their mistakes or face their flaws. They're either all about harems, slavery apologism, and giving main characters powers on a silver platter to the point they may as well be Mary Sues/Gary Stus. Also, there's a really stupid, misogynistic double standard I've been seeing in terms of how women MCs are treated compared to their male counterparts. Apparently some people hate Natsuko for having human flaws and saying she's the worst protag ever, but are also the same people who are totally cool with Naofumi from Shield Hero, a misanthropic slave owner, and Rudeus from Mushoku Tensei, a creepy pedo who has no qualms about child grooming, violating people's boundaries, and violence against women. And no, don't try to convince me that they grow past their flaws too, because unlike Zenshu, which actually challenges Natsuko's views and makes her grow as a person, Shield Hero and Jobless Reincarnation bend over backwards to put their protags on pedestals, reward their shittiness, and sweep their flaws under the rug. I highly recommend reading this article on Jobless which explains so many of the show's problems in far better detail than I could ever hope to do. All Natsuko does is act arrogant and not want to cooperate with others...yet apparently that's worse than literal slavery, misogyny, child grooming, and sexual assault? Miss me with that "Girls must be perfect widdle angels while boys can do whatever the hell they want" bullshit.

Tl;dr, Natsuko is great. The other characters, on the other hand? Well, they're not...bad, per se, but compared to Natsuko, they don't get nearly as much development, and I think part of it is due to the series' short length. Obviously, 12 episodes isn't going to be enough to tell a story like this or flesh out the characters as much as they deserve. By themselves, Luke, Unio, Justice, Memmeln, and Destiny are fine, but there simply isn't enough time devoted to them to make them more three-dimensional. In this aspect, I feel Zenshu would have been better off had it been 24 episodes instead of 12, that way it would have had more time to devote to showing what the characters are like outside of saving the world, fleshing out the setting beyond the Last Town, or even expanding on other characters, like the Nine Soldiers members who died, or the movie's director before her untimely death. There's a wealth of material to be mined and explored in Zenshu. Had Zenshu been made about thirty or so years ago, it might have been allowed that extra time to do more with itself. Zenshu is a nice enough show for what it already has, don't get me wrong, but if it had more time, it could have gone from simply good to great to even very top-tier. Also, my biggest issue with the writing for Memmeln is the resolution to her arc. Seriously, your solution to solving an elf's problems with outliving all her friends is to have her drool over an Uta no Prince-sama parody, complete with Mamoru Miyano voicing him, and having them dance together in a Disney's Beauty and the Beast style musical number? Not gonna lie, I rolled my eyes at the sheer cheesiness of it all.

Actually, this speaks to another problem caused by Zenshu's short length: There's a lot of narrative questions left hanging, unexplained, and unanswered. What are the Voids and why are they causing havoc? Why is Natsuko's pegbar both magic and sentient? How does Natsuko's family feel about her love of animation, her job, and her personality? What relationship does she have with her own family? How did Natsuko even manage to get back to Earth when it was shown she supposedly died from food poisoning? Not to mention a lot of stuff in the ending also goes completely unexplained. Speaking of the ending, that's definitely another one of Zenshu's weak spots, as not only does it feel way too overly happy and convenient, several characters magically come back to life when they really shouldn't have, which really cheapens their loss. Yet even with all these issues, Zenshu is a breath of fresh air in the pile of stale isekai excrement, a love letter to the wonders of creativity and a reminder of what isekai used to be, can be, and still be capable of. Isekai doesn't have to just be escapist wish fulfillment or reincarnated villainesses in pretty dresses trying to get with a man. Seriously, let there be more isekai like Zenshu...as long as Mappa doesn't continue to overwork its animators and treat them like shit. RIGHT, MAPPA???