When Anime Trending and several other outlets attended a Takopi’s Original Sin roundtable interview at Anime NYC 2025, it was perhaps inevitable that we’d hear about the titular alien from Happy Planet. While a lot of the session centered on the freedom allocated to the web anime, some time was spent talking about Takopi as well.
Responding to a question from Anime Corner about his biggest priorities for the anime adaptation, director and series composer Shinya Iino said that there were three “almost cardinal rules” that he put forth at the initial pitch meeting. The first was “showing Takopi in the most appealing way, in the most cute way.”
“This is animation, moving image, so through his movements or dialogue or whatever, we had to really highlight Takopi,” Iino said.
The other “almost cardinal rules” were maintaining the feel of the manga, with Iino noting that “every chapter ends on a cliffhanger” in the script and depicting the main characters’ struggles and journey towards happiness faithfully. For the third rule, Iino said, “Shizuka, Marina, Azuma, and even Takopi — they all want to be happy, but they don’t know how to get there, or they start out not knowing how to get there, and they really strive and struggle to reach that end goal of happiness. So I definitely wanted to make sure that was depicted faithfully as well.”
The music for Takopi was also something Iino was mindful of. Responding to a soundtrack and SFX question from Yatta-Tachi, the director first spoke of how he “wanted music that would evoke a lot of sentimentality or reflect the sentimentality” of Takopi’s Original Sin before noting that Takopi was a foil to this. Hence, he “wanted something very upbeat, involving lots of instruments, especially like percussion and so forth, to really reflect Takopi’s personality — something that would invoke the audience to almost clap along with.”
As for the inner workings of Takopi, Iino said that he “personally also thought that Takopi was very childlike. Yet, as the story unfolds, Takopi grows to realize the mistakes that Takopi caused, and then tries to correct them, and whether that works or not. So in the end, I think one of the overarching themes is that it’s a growing-up story.”
He continued: “But this is something that I realized before we even started producing the anime, as I was talking to various members of the team. For you to also point out that you thought and that you also felt that Takopi was the most human-like — even more human than the actual human characters — makes me really happy.”
The roundtable session didn’t dive into the human characters individually, but Iino did say this in response to The Fandom Post asking about how the story’s moral complexity influenced his creative choices: “Whether it’s Takopi or the other characters, of course the story’s full of them making mistakes, whether deliberately or mostly accidentally. And yet, I think that they themselves are not at an age where they’re really self-aware that what they did is good or bad.
“As someone who’s on the side of the creative team, I didn’t want to preassign, or presume, or predetermine whether the action itself is good or bad, because even if it was a bad action leading to something good afterwards, or if it was a good action that ended up turning out to be bad… So it was very important for me to take a step back and look at it overall in a very protective manner, then try to say ‘No, this is good’ or ‘No, this is bad.’”
The roundtable session was conducted via interpreter, and some responses were lightly edited for clarity. Session attended by Isabelle Lee.
