Zenshu: What Is The Soul Of Sakuga?

Zenshu, one of the standout animes of last season, positions itself as a love letter to animation. But under all the smooth movement and beautiful effects, what does it think animation really means?

Zenshu feels like a throwback among the endless flood of isekai shows that come out each season. Sure, its main character Natsuko dies and is transported to the generically mandated Another World, but rather than a video game the show takes its cues from 90s-or-so anime fantasy film, and rather than reincarnating as one of the cast and struggling against archetype and narrative to alter events, she's an outsider inserted into the plot. Yeah, it's... sort of self-insert fix-it fic, vintage fanfiction dot net style! And Natsuko is, if we're being honest, maybe a bit of a Mary Sue too: a preternaturally gifted animator who alters the course of her favorite movie, A Tale of Perishing, with her own awesome sakuga--a term that just means animation but which frequently gets used in anime fan circles as a shorthand for ultra-fluid, flashily animated sequences. Natsuko enters the story, learns about life and love and herself, draws a bunch of cool shit, and returns to her job in the animation industry rejuvenated and ready to work.

It's, like, fine. The animation and character designs are fine, the plot is, like, fine. There's a seemingly nonbinary dragon who for a hot minute seems like they're gonna try to be a rival love interest, but that never really goes anywhere unfortunately. The main romantic lead, Luke, feels pretty generic to me, but I guess that's sort of the point. Natsuko accidentally convinces Luke's original love interest to become a masked muscle bound luchador, which is pretty great and surely a kind of funny meta-joke about how love interests get carefully written out of this kind of self-insert fic. It's fine. Fun enough for what it is, which is... self-insert mary sue fix it fic, about a film that doesn't exist. People seem to like it, it's pretty to look at, and it doesn't have any weird apologia for slavery or creepy incel bullshit, so that puts it head and shoulders above most of the isekai nutrient slurry piped to viewers in bulk every season.

But wow it feels like it's got some odd ideas about art.

A Tale of Perishing is textually a failed film, a seemingly kid friendly fantasy film with a grim and nihilistic conclusion, which paid at the box office for its dark themes. Natsuko quests to alter the film's events and achieve a happy ending. The grim logic of the film world--both the social realities of its fantasy setting and the implacable "voids" seeking to destroy existence--bounces back elastically into its grim shape, though, despite her best efforts. The film seems to have futility baked into its essence. That is its message. Natsuko has no interest in hearing it.

Which comes across particularly odd when the actual director of A Tale of Perishing (who has, herself, perished of food poisoning) shows up to tell Natsuko that her fix-it fic meddling is useless. As demiurges go, Kametaro Tsuruyama isn't super charismatic, despite having a great design (a dour looking bird with a turtle shell back). She just pops in a few times to lecture Natsuko about how useless her attempts are, then... fucks off again, content to observe. She's no Drosselmeyer (Princess Tutu), Akio Ohtori (Revolutionary Girl Utena), or even Dirk Strider (you all know my good friend Dirk): she isn't driven to keep the narrative on a particular path, she's just confident that her world will take its natural, apocalyptic course. When Natsuko defies her predictions, she grumpily flies off into the sunset, admonishing everyone not to "go thinking happy endings are all there is to entertainment," a line that makes me feel a bit crazy every time I think about it.

What's her motivation? Profoundly unclear! Why did she make the film in the first place? Profoundly unclear! Does she wind up coming back to life too? Eh! Man, what a way to go, right? You create a cool film that no one understands, you die from some bad seafood, then some brat upstart comes into your film and just deus ex machinas the ending to be happy after all, to the point where even people who died in the backstory spring back to life... and you just have to live there forever, I guess. What a drag! I'd call these characters easygoing simpletons, too!

Are you starting to get a sense of why I came away from this one feeling kinda weird about its attitude towards art and how fans engage with it?

I think started to really question what the series had going under the hood in the episode where Natsuko has to end a threat close to the characters' hearts. One of the heroic Nine Soldiers, the elf Memmeln, is part of a cult trying to hasten the apocalypse and end the world's suffering. Laying out her rationale, Memmeln describes a centuries long lifespan during which she and her fellows witness continuous war and strife. Concluding that only the coming end of the world will end these cycles of violence, she hopes to usher in its end.

Natsuko persuades her otherwise by drawing, uh, a character called "Sir Exister" who's, I guess, so cool and Positive Vibes that he persuades Memmeln not to end it all? Gonna be real with you girls this one really didn't work for me. It just felt fundamentally, unavoidably trivializing, in the long tradition of kind of mawkish anti-suicide media. Do I think art has a power to give people hope or at least keep them alive? Sure, I mean I guess, but for me anyway I find the blunt practicality of something like Seeming's "Remember To Breathe"--"And I didn't do it today/Cause I don't want you to have to deal with the cops"--much more resonant and persuasive in its genuine expression of suffering an attempt to move beyond it or endure it than a chipper assertion that "existence is worth it!" If that rings a bit hollow to me, imagine how it must sound to an ancient elf tired from centuries of strife! It's a profoundly unspecific message, for someone like Natsuko who is an alleged superfan of A Tale of Perishing.

That's the thing, though. Natsuko doesn't really seem to understand what she likes about A Tale of Perishing as a holistic text, or what the film might be trying to say. "I've seen it so many times, and I still don't get it", she remarks in the first episode, "but that's what's great about it." She likes all the blorbos, to be sure! She has their character sheets memorized down to all the trivia that didn't make it into the film. She clearly thinks the film is very cool. But why director Kametaro Tsuruyama made the film world this way remains a mystery to Natsuko and, by extension, to us. The film (and arguably its world of characters) is a useful vehicle for Natsuko's discovery of "first love" so she can make a film about that subject, a sort of solipsistic relationship to have with a film that she champions despite its broad unpopularity.

I wonder if the notion is that Natsuko renews the world of A Tale of Perishing by finding her true first love: animation. That's almost certainly a stretch or willful misreading given her final act that saves the world is declaring her love for Luke, but whatever. Let's play in the space for a minute, if only because of how the notion fits in with the single best episode of the series, the one standout that actually kept me watching midway through. In that episode, "First Love", a parade of characters encounter Natsuko as she grows up and grows into herself as an animator. They each fall in love with her and her drawings, but she barely notices them, so set is she on her love of film, THIS film. It's a poignant, naturalistic exploration of these characters that reaches a maturity I... didn't really feel from a lot of the rest of the series. The sense from that episode is that her first love is animation, and the whole process of the series is just her rediscovering, in the course of engaging directly with A Tale of Perishing and her romance with Luke, that love for animation, along with a willingness to share that love with others rather than trying to be a singular powerhouse.

It's sort of an odd message, though, if message it is (and, again, I think I might be straining credibility with this reparative reading). Is there really nothing else to learn from A Tale of Perishing besides "wow, animation is so cool", or "wow I really like this cartoon boy"? Was director Tsuruyama offering nothing else to the viewer other than a protagonist so charismatic that you just HAVE to write self insert mary sue fix it fic about it? Is that the healthiest and most genuine engagement with a seemingly difficult work of art?

Also, can I just say, the emphasis on personal responsibility on Natsuko's part, that she's working herself too hard, is maybe well taken to an extent but strikes a weird tone in an overworked and exploitative industry. Doesn't it also sit weirdly with the dramatic climax of her literally dissolving into ash while frantically finishing her last animated sequence? I've noticed a contradictory tension among sakuga fans that mirrors this strange mixed message: on the one hand, there's a lot of generalized concern about the sustainability of the industry. But, as with so many industries, from games to comics to blockbuster film, there's also a demand for ever more impressive graphical achievements and fidelity, offered to the consumer at a "reasonable" price, and even a tendency to sternly admonish producers who fall short. In this environment, the blame for overwork winds up falling on individuals rather than the way the system of capitalism has produced unpleasable fanbases. I can't help but contrast how this show responds to this dynamic with the animation themed episodes of Golden Boy or Paranoia Agent, which practically beg the audience to appreciate the collective labor that goes into animation.

Zenshu feels like a love letter to animation in a sense, but almost a step removed: a love letter, to love letters, or love letter lovers. Like, isn't it great to be an anime fan? I don't really disagree, anime rules, but I gravitate towards it because of the ideas presented in my favorite anime, or how the visuals express those ideas imaginatively. While I love your Akiras or your Princess Mononokes, I also love a lot of stuff that's more, uh, Worker and Parasite-core, because I find "ugly" animation aesthetics selected for a purpose or used because that was the best way someone could get a vision onto the screen just as compelling as intricate, fluid naturalism. And, after a decade of watching fandoms throw massive collective tantrums when they feel they're not being given the product they paid for, I can't help but balk a bit at Zenshu's seeming endorsement of a weirdly entitled and immature fandom. It reminds me of people who just love particular characters, really build their whole internet identity around them even, but you ask them what they think of the story and: "oh, it's so awful how the creator butchered the character by giving them this personality, backstory, and narrative role." What, uh, is left, then?

I get that there's an irony to this position, considering my history of championing fan works. I just watched Alien³ for the first time--well, sort of. I actually watched the "Legacy Cut", an extensive remastering and recutting of the different versions of the film paired with redone visuals for the alien. I loved it, and after watching it together Sarah and I pored over the extensive production notes for the project. This was clearly a labor of love, and one that, intriguingly, often tries to underline rather than cover up what a nasty, cynical, feel-bad movie Alien³ can be! Actually, in the course of highlighting those elements it winds up slotting in quite neatly with themes in Paradise, the similarly brilliant fan edit of Prometheus and Covenant into a single film. I think it would be really funny to introduce someone to the Alien franchise by just showing them these two films.

There is no argument, of course, that this was anyone's intent when they made any of those films. Though, given the troubled production history and the many hands all those films passed through, intent becomes... unstable. Treacherous ground, even. That in itself is kind of thrilling, though, and I wish Zenshu had more interest in sitting in the complexity of fandom engagement with art, particularly this sort of engagement where you're actively going into a text and reworking it. What does it look like if Natsuko *can't* save the world of A Tale of Perishing? What film does she make about "first love" if she watches helplessly as her own first love ends all existence? What does it mean for her relationship to Director Tsuruyama, whose working strategy she modeled her life around? Do you need the acceptance of a mentor or an audience for your intervention in a text, or is art just something you do for your own vision--and if that's the case, are Natsuko and Tsuruyama so different?

I guess what I is for the approach offered by a different show: Re:Creators, a 22 episode series that unfortunately languishes on Amazon's streaming service and hasn't gotten a physical international release. (The blu rays go for $60 a pop, are out of print, and divide the series across 8 boxes, so I don't expect to ever own a non-pirated copy.) The series has the kind of inauspicious pitch of "a teen boy's world gets turned upside down when a bunch of fictional characters from different franchises start to appear in real life!", but the series only gestures towards a kind of generic protagonist wish fulfillment narrative for... about an episode before switching to the more interesting questions it has on its mind. Questions like those raised in the climax of episode 2: what if a Precure character accidentally almost did a 9/11 cause she can't emotionally handle someone telling her she's wrong, and doesn't understand the real violent impact of her powers when used in the real world?

Re:Creators is full of brilliant explorations and deconstructions of genre tropes like this, but what really captured my heart is the nuanced and sometimes uncomfortable meditations on narrative. Most of the characters summoned to the real world have a contentious if not outright murderously hostile relationship to their creators: after all, these self styled gods are the literal authors of their misfortunes. But these authors also get to speak up in their own defense. At the tail end of the series, in fact, one of these authors gives a dramatic speech that she would put her main character (who, incidentally, has just shot her in the chest as revenge for the death of his daughter) through any sort of hell if it made for a good story. This isn't depicted as noble, necessarily. The seemingly generic nerd boy protagonist of the series, artfully mirroring the swapping of heroic and villainous roles throughout the narrative, comes across as deeply morally compromised, having failed others in arguably unforgivable ways, and exploiting the chaotic circumstances and mass audience investment to assuage his own guilt. All that may be true, and the plot he concocts might be dirty and underhanded. But in a story, he asserts, this is allowed, so long as the audience is convinced. And, in the end, we are, even knowing all the while that we're being tricked.

It's this messy engagement that makes me come away from Re:Creators feeling like it's an actual love letter to storytelling, warts and all. It's the kind of introspection I hoped for from Zenshu. And, alright, maybe that was demanding too much from a series half as long with a primary focus on the wish fulfilment romance angle. But the series does want to use animation and a love of beautiful pictures as the driver of its affective impact. I hoped that Natsuko might reach a point of greater self confrontation, or that the show might have more to say on the real, complicated work that goes into animation, but the show left me feeling that Natsuko, and fans like her, still have a lot of growing up to do.

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