Takopi’s Original Sin is one of the most notable anime of the Summer 2025 anime season, a compact six-episode series that uses its web anime status, powerful storyboards and direction, and tactile drawings to deliver a gut-wrenching portrait of despair and hope. At Anime NYC 2025, a roundtable interview session with series director and series composer Shinya Iino and producer Kotaro Sudo gave the attending outlets the opportunity to learn more about how the anime adaptation of Taizan 5’s manga came to be, and how the production team approached it.
Sudo, whose previous producer credits include the idiosyncratic Pop Team Epic anime, pitched the adaptation to ENISHIYA, a young studio founded in 2018 that had previously displayed its production chops with short-form work (like Overwatch 2’s “Protector” animation PV and the animated bits of Ed Sheeran and Pokēmon’s “Celestial”) and fully outsourced episodes (like TV series Delicious in Dungeon Episode 6 and TV series Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Episode 14). The idea, he said, “was bounced around and definitely we got a lot of opinions, a lot of varying opinions, but overall, it was more positive than negative.”
“What’s interesting is that a lot of people said, ‘We don’t think any other company would pick this up, so we gotta do it,’ especially because it’s such a timely theme and story, and we really feel like it needs to be animated,” said Sudo. “And if it’s going to be animated, then we should be the ones to do it.”
Iino and “other key crew members” of Takopi’s Original Sin were proposed by ENISHIYA. According to Iino, the short length of the anime meant that they already knew from the very beginning who would be responsible for the storyboarding and direction of each episode.
“For example, we had a single storyboard artist and a single episode director per episode, and that was known from the very get-go. And they were all individuals who were going to put their all into that particular episode. And I think that’s why we were able to get such high-quality anime out of it.”
For reference, that storyboard artist and episode director roster includes talents like Moaang [Akebi’s Sailor Uniform Episode 7], Rikka a.k.a Eri Irei [Onimai Episode 2], Toya Oshima [FGO Babylonia‘s co-action director], Hirotaka Mori [Tengoku-Daimkayo director], and Iino himself.
Iino thinks that the smaller episode count for Takopi’s Original Sin “definitely helped in terms of our physical stamina,” though the density of the story meant that “maybe we were more mentally tired at the end”. It also allowed the team to “really focus more of our concentration in each episode and deliver really high-quality episodes rather than if we had to rush through many more episodes.”
Sudo said that “it took about three years from pitch to final product, actual streaming. And yet that’s actually the average length of time it takes for even a TV series… So the fact that we spent pretty much the same amount of time for half the number of episodes really shows how much creativity and how much the talent was able to focus on bringing such high-quality work.”
As viewers would already know, Takopi’s Original Sin not only avoided forcibly extending the original story but also took a flexible approach to the series’ structure and pacing, with episodes varying in length. “Episode one is significantly longer than a typical TV episode. And yet, there were other episodes that were slightly shorter than the maximum length of a TV episode. So in terms of the length of each episode, the tempo, the pacing, we were definitely able to do something really good because we had the relative freedom to do so.”
The team also took freedom into account when it came to the writing and visuals. “So actually, one of the things we definitely prioritized was to not place any restrictions on the scripts or storyboards at all. It was pretty much like no limit — we wanted the staff, including the director, to decide how to best adapt the manga and in which direction to take it,” Iino shared. “Sometimes, actually, I know that poses a challenge to have no restrictions at all, but it was really important for us to give them the power to allow them to really choose the best direction to adapt it.”
Sudo says that had Takopi’s Original Sin been a TV anime, it would have reached a wider audience. However, airing on TV means contending with more restrictions and limits, and “it was really important for us to preserve the powerful message and the really excellent quality of the original work. Therefore, we went with preserving and honoring the original work over getting more viewership.”
Despite skipping TV, Iino said that the response to the show was still a great deal more than expected. “It was just overwhelming to see how many people had positive reactions to this work.”
The roundtable session was conducted via interpreter, and some responses were lightly edited for clarity. Melvyn Tan contributed Anime Trending’s questions, while Isabelle Lee attended the session.
