Anime Spotlight #48: ZENSHU
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a.k.a. The Fully Reworked Animeister
A new fate has been drawn, Ticketholders!
The Dragon Ball fans among you may recognize the title of today's Spotlighted Anime from Dragon Ball's supplimental lore guides, the Kanzenshu and Daizenshu (often rendered with a doubled "u" at the end), even if you don't know what it means.
In this sense, it means "everything complete" or "whole collection," referring to complete reference guides on the Dragon Ball franchise at their time, and now has its own website.
But in the sense of the ZENSHU anime (and the recent history behind this very post), its definitions of "redo everything" and "full repair" are more apt to a fated degree.
As you may remember from my birthday Time Drops post, I was originally going to do an update on My Hero Academia today that included my full thoughts on Season Six and Seven as well as the You're Next movie. But a combination of circumstances within and beyond my control (Plus Ultra complications, you might say) led me to delay its release in favor of something much more current and much less ambitious, but still in line with the hero theme of my birth month; I gave my schedule a redo and repair by choosing to review ZENSHU.
So please make a minor zenshu of your personal time to Become A Ticketholder for real if you haven't yet drawn yourself that fate, frantically scribble a comment at the bottom of this post like your life depends on it, help out my ad revenue as you read so my Soul can have a Future beyond the Void, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.
Natsuko Hirose (Madeline Morris, who ironically also dubbed the female lead in Meiji Tokyo Renka, but is probably more recognizable as the dub voice of Rudeus Greyrat in Mushoku Tensei) is a girl so scientifically obsessed with drawing that she became an animation virtuoso straight out of high school and quickly advanced to a directing role.
She begins the series in the midst of a creative drought while working on a romance feature (since the feeling of a first love isn't something easily adapted into animation, especially if you haven't experienced it for yourself, and Natsuko is far too obsessed with drawing to grasp it), overworking herself by correcting the mistakes of her co-workers, annoying and terrifying local couples to learn the secrets of the heart, and being generally reclusive and terrible to work with...until she dies of food poisoning and wakes up in the world of her favorite (but critically panned) anime film, "A Tale Of Perishing."
What ensues is a perfect blend of focused meta-awareness (Natsuko is a pure fangirl, knowing every statistic and intimate detail of every character from both reference sheets and the movie itself) and in-Universe sociopolitical subversions (even though she knows everything that will happen in the story, the world reasons behind certain events and how her own actions will affect the "fate" of said world are often unexpected).
At one point, there were multiple kingdoms across the world that were home to large, crystalline structures called Soul Futures that acted as a sort of sealing mechanism for a great, primal evil known as the Ultimate Void. Despite the gathering of the Nine Soldiers (champions of different races from across the world), the threat of the crab-like Void creatures was unrelenting, most of civilization was wiped out, and several of the Nine Soldiers were killed prior to the beginning of "A Tale Of Perishing" (when Natsuko arrives).
As is to be expected from an isekai, Natsuko discovers that her pegboard has been transported with her and gained sentience and magical powers. So when her favorite characters (whom she comes to acknowledge as real people in the scope of the movie's fantasy world) come under attack with seemingly no hope of victory or survival, Zenshu goes full magical girl transformation sequence and henshins her up an animation desk in almost every episode where she speedruns short, rough (in the context of the series; the actual animation of the series itself, particularly these sequences, is absolutely gorgeous and spectacular) animation drafts that come to life and fight off the attacking Void(s) like she's playing a real-time strategy version of Duel Monsters.
As a result, her actions bring hope and new dynamics and revelations (both good and bad) to the fantasy world around her, but things get dark (as they often do in the third act of a one-season anime) with the emergence of a turtle-bird that talks in the voice of the "Perishing" film's director (who was said to have also died of food poisoning at the beginning of the series), a revived Void-worshipping cult, the spreading of distrust amongst the citizens of The Last Town (yeah, naming conventions in this series are intentionally cheesy and on-the-nose), and the Voids suddenly evolving to mimic Natsuko's creations (including a squiggly reject drawing that proves to make the Voids more powerful than expected). With nearly all hope lost, a fading Natsuko must use the object of her newly discovered love (the stock, handsome hero archetype, Luke Braveheart) to fully redo and repair the fictional world when the mounting despair turns Luke himself into the Ultimate Void.
Though Natsuko does return to the real world with a new outlook on her profession, her life, her love, and herself, the World Of Perishing still exists and the director-turtle-bird is still at large, leaving the story open for continuation.
My OCD says they should keep going with a second season, but I also enjoyed Zenshu so much that I'd be just as happy if Ueno, Yamazaki, and MAPPA quit while they were ahead.
Animeister,
Drawn
Out.
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