Anime columnist Andrew Osmond discusses the recent smash series and how its production studio worked with ‘Scott Pilgrim’ and Naoko Yamada.
A little over a year ago, I visited the anime studio Science SARU in Tokyo.Like many such studios, its colorfully flamboyant work is made in an anonymous building.
Science SARU is situated well away from Tokyo’s neon-lit center, in a quiet residential neighborhood without giant screens or pachinko parlors.When I went there, the only sign of the building’s identity was a metal plate beside the door, depicting a critter with rubber-hose legs.It’s SARU’s mascot.
I visited the studio before Science SARU announced it was making the show that would become one of the main anime hits of 2024, the madcap action-romcom-lunatic .Still, SARU’s President, Eunyoung Choi, was in bullish mood.When I asked her where she thought SARU was now, she pointed up how the studio was diversifying.
It was using in-house talent outside directors; it was making original stories ambitious collaborations.“We’re really moving forward,” Choi said, “and sending projects to the world in the next few years.” Take-off with Back then, the studio was just releasing its Netflix miniseries .It was a riff on the strip and film versions of , originally created by the Canadian artist Bryan Lee O’Malley.
O’Malley co-wrote the anime too; it takes his characters into a radically new timeline.Science SARU seamlessly translated his designs into motion, with snot-bubbles, button eyes and silly mouths.“It was a feeling,” Choi said of the property.
“A great match with the team, and a good vibe about the project… The visuals are really fun, and also very creative.The character design style is not like an anime style, but on the other hand, it was, .” According to Choi, the staff were especially galvanized about animating ’s fights.“A lot of animators were really motivated, and sometimes the animation turned out to be something we didn’t expect.” As with many streaming shows, we can only guess how well the show did commercially.
But it won critical kudos among outlets that would normally never think of covering anime.The name was vital; it gave mainstream pundits a way into the series that few other anime offered.The show was reviewed a series, not as an anime.
Ghosts! Aliens! Ghosts! Aliens! Science SARU’s new series, , has no such broad accessibility.Helmed by Fuga Yamashiro in his series director debut, it’s brash.It’s anarchic.
It has a ton of dick jokes.It subjects the heroine to a slapstick sexual threat in Part One (even if it’s so absurd it hardly registers as a threat at all).Many Western media outlets would hesitate to give such a show exposure, but it didn’t need them to get buzz.
In an extraordinary move, ’s first three episodes were previewed in cinemas in more than 50 territories around the world this past September, including North America.(I was in London at the time, catching them in a West End multiplex.) Even more brazenly, the third part, which concluded the screening, ended just a huge battle., the preview might as well have said,It was reckless fan-bait, and it worked.
The subsequent episodes streamed across Netflix, Hulu and Crunchyroll.As of writing, anime websites are awash in fan raves, and a second anime season is confirmed for next July.Here’s the Season 2 teaser released earlier this week: Most of ’s ingredients are familiar from a host of other anime, old and recent.
The story has a brash girl and a geekish boy, Ayase and Takakura, who find Japan teeming with ghosts and aliens, many of which target the pair after they’re powered up supernaturally in Part One.There are frequent frantic fights and chases, new characters to meet (though far fewer than in many fight anime), and a last episode that closes, naturally, on another cliff-hanger.As with , many of the show’s virtues presumably reflect the source material, a manga by Yukinobu Tatsu.
The caliber of the adapter is also worth noting.The show’s writer is the vastly experienced Hiroshi Seko, whose anime credits include , , and .Despite the madness of the first episodes, and the aggressive raucousness of much of the humor, it’s soon clear this is a sweet-hearted story.The series never strays far from the central youngsters, their charmingly clunky friendship, and their innate sense of honor.
Like most anime series, doesn’t mock its audience for about the characters.That’s a stark contrast to American shows like and , which bury their moments of caring deep mockery, like a hedgehog in prickles.If the show’s charm reflects the source material, then the action scenes reflect anime’s industrial state of the art in 2024.
They’re spectacular and stylish – for example, the bold use of monochrome for several set-pieces, such as red for an extended chase-battle scene with a colossal crab.But other studios do just as well.What stands out more in are the-action scenes, especially those that sell unpromising set-ups through determinedly interesting visuals.
For example, when a hyper-annoying male love-rival for Takakura appears, his relentlessly crazy gestures are unbearable at first.But then they become horribly fascinating.His extended introduction is also broken up by a completely different kind of scene.
Set at night, it’s an exquisitely awkward “see you tomorrow” between Ayase and Takakura.The characters’ words carry far less weight than Ayase’s exasperation and Takakura’s miserable dissembling… and the scene is allowed to run on and on, for what seems forever.(It’s about 90 seconds of screen time.) also has a whole episode, Part 7, which starts as a standard-seeming fantasy battle, then turns into a raw, non-magical drama about a financially struggling mum and daughter, which itself runs the gamut from joy to bloody horror.
On one level, you watch it playing out as a stunt, and yet the guilelessness of the whole series makes you surrender to the strings as they’re pulled.Like some other classic anime, the overwhelming feelings in this episode are expressed not in song but in dance.A dead mother who’s lost everything in her world pirouettes exquisitely beneath stars, before becoming a monster.
It has shades of another standout episode of a brash action anime; namely, Part Eight of last year’s , by the MAPPA studio.Then, the flamboyant action suddenly gave way to messy, clumsy realism, the heroes’ cool fight moves on the battlefield suddenly replaced by fumbling micro-movements in the bedroom.The Yamada factor If was ignored by mainstream outlets, then Science SARU can court them with its new anime.
The film will open in American and British cinemas in January 2025.Infinitely gentler than , it’s a feelgood drama about oddball teens.The director is the feted Naoko Yamada, who’s best known for her work with Kyoto Animation, including .
I’ve seen and it’s fascinating to watch Yamada’s style, overwhelmingly familiar to her league of fans, rendered by another studio.There’s the same delicacy of movements and linework; there’s the same focus on hands and legs. The continuity is obvious if you compare a trailer with one for Yamada’s 2018 film , which was made at Kyoto Animation.And yet ’s colors feel hazier, its lines bouncier.
I interviewed Yamada for in 2022, soon after she joined Science SARU.At that time, she commented that Kyoto Animation trained her to portray human emotions, and to treat characters as “real” beings.In contrast, she said, “Science SARU really embraces the pleasure of making animation; everything is about being happy creating animation.
I was curious about how those two [approaches] would marry up.” This year, I would interview Yamada again after she’d finished .I asked her if SARU’s looser style had made a difference, for example, to the characters’ funnier movements and facial expressions? “I don’t think it’s a case of the studio,” she replied.“It’s what the film required.
If I say this is the kind of freedom I need to create this film, then that would be possible at either studio [Science SARU or Kyoto Animation].” Taking Yamada’s two comments together, they suggest that Science SARU has a distinctive style and ethos, but it’s subtler than funny faces or a particular palette.Masaaki Yuasa and Beyond This bears out Choi’s earlier comments about Science SARU diversifying.But she might have also been reflecting on how Science SARU has managed a very difficult feat for an animation studio – namely, to emerge from a star creator’s shadow.
When Science SARU was founded 11 years ago, in 2013, its purpose seemed to be to showcase the work of one “star” director.That director was Masaaki Yuasa, who’d built up a formidable reputation in the decades SARU, in anime for film and television.For readers who don’t know Yuasa’s work, his proclivities include splashy colors, loose lines and transformations comic and casual.
“I want to see more relaxed animation coming from Japan,” he once declared.For many years, Science SARU’s productions (barring below-line work) were almost always Yuasa-directed.They included cinema films such as 2017’s , which is an excellent stand-alone film (think in Kyoto with more booze).
But it’s also a stylistic sequel to a pre-SARU classic by Yuasa, the 2010 TV series .Science SARU’s other films include Yuasa’s (also 2017), (2019) and (2022).Over the same period, SARU released Yuasa-directed serials made for TV or streamers.
The first was in 2014 (brilliant!), followed by the apocalyptic horror series (2018).The latter was for Netflix, with Yuasa capitalizing on that to include far more explicit sex and violence than TV would allow.He followed that with the delightful (2020), about young animators.
Then he returned to the apocalypse with the same year’s , for Netflix.And yet, in almost a blink, Yuasa’s dominance ended.In 2020, he retired as President of Science SARU, giving the position to his long-time collaborator Choi, who’d co-founded the studio with Yuasa back in 2013.
Like Yuasa, Choi had begun as an animator; in 2020, she spoke of bridging anime and Western animation styles.And in the years since, and especially after the release of in 2022, SARU has moved rapidly away from being “the Masaaki Yuasa studio.” This is significant because of how other great studios have to detach themselves from their most famous star.There’s Aardman Animations in Britain, still forever associated in the public mind with Nick Park, creator of .
In America, when Walt Disney died in 1966, his company struggled for two decades to find a new identity, finally forging one from Broadway and princesses.But the starkest example of the syndrome is in Japan.Studio Ghibli is still popularly known as “the Hayao Miyazaki studio,” despite trying to find successors to him for the last 30 years.
SARU has shaken off its association with Yuasa in less than three.As of writing, Science SARU’s next productions will include the second season of next July, as well as another action series, , in the Fall.But the studio also has another TV series already confirmed for 2026.
It’s SARU’s take on a decades-old cyberpunk classic, .After what it’s done for , and Naoko Yamada, that should be worth seeing.Andrew Osmond is a British author and journalist, specialising in animation and fantasy media.
His email is [email protected].
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