Although the winter anime season is in full swing, most anime fans are still riding the high from last year’s slate of shows—key among them being the first-ballot anime of the year contender Dan Da Dan. Immediately following its cliffhanger season finale, animation studio Science Saru revealed that fans won’t have to hold their breath for long, as a second season is set to premiere in July 2025.
To tide folks over as they contemplate reading ahead in the manga, io9 spoke with director Fuga Yamashiro to pick his brain about the challenges of anime adaptations, Momo Ayase and Okarun’s budding romance, and how he and his team brought Yukinobu Tatsu’s wacky ongoing manga to life.
Isaiah Colbert, io9: Anime adaptations often settle for being a one-for-one recreation of manga panels rather than taking risks beyond being an exact copy of its source material. What was your guiding principle for directing Dan Da Dan?
Fuga Yamashiro: I wanted to avoid having the anime compared to the manga, so I tried sort of rebuilding Dan Da Dan with a different approach from the manga whenever possible. What I mean is, making animation is a group process, so I was trying always to change the field we were playing on, to dodge turning it into a “which has the better art” contest. But at the same time, it was necessary to replicate the impression the manga gives, so I put effort into capturing the impactful panels from the manga I assumed everyone wanted to see—the really cool panels, the spreads, etc.
io9: What are some of your favorite moments when deviating from the manga to create additional scenes/changes in the anime?
Yamashiro: I think the base is the manga, but a lot of the styles and techniques used are exclusive to the medium of anime. I didn’t change this simply because I wanted to change things, but rather because manga and anime are different mediums. You need to translate what’s depicted in manga into anime form in order to give anime viewers the same impression manga readers had. Anime is different from manga, which you can read at your own pace, in that each frame is assigned a specific amount of time. So I paid a lot of attention to the details and adjusted things as necessary to stay close to the idea of Dan Da Dan that readers of the manga had.
io9: What has been your favorite sequence to animate for Dan Da Dan, and why?
Yamashiro: The crab chase scene in episode four. It really captures the freedom and energy of animation, and also marks the first time Momo and Okarun work together from a dramatic standpoint. They’re in perfect harmony for the first time, completing the buddy unit. There’s a real catharsis in that drama, and it links really well with the energy on screen. A ton of effort was put into the scene in every way—human drama, visuals, and music—and it feels dramatic, but also optimistic. The atmosphere I was aiming for in Dan Da Dan, the relationship between Momo and Okarun in episodes 1-4, it’s all distilled in this scene where they work together.
By the way, before they take off, Okarun takes Momo’s hand, and helps her stand up. This isn’t supposed to be comedic, but rather this marks the first time they purposefully touch each other. They’re not really aware of it, but it’s almost like a handshake. I think that’s super dramatic and cool.
io9: Dan Da Dan stands out by having a filmmaker’s approach to framing and depicting action through first-person point-of-view scenes or villains just out of frame. Where does that direction stem from? Is it a result of standing out from your contemporaries with adapting works, or is it simply taking inspiration from different mediums’ approaches to storytelling?
Yamashiro: I hoped to have visuals and scenes with real direction to them, not just simple paper dolls on screen. As for the reason the camera is so often at around human height and not too high up, it’s to make the audience feel like they’re there with the characters. I wanted to make it feel like you’re laughing, talking, or feeling afraid along with them.
There are no episodes or scenes that don’t have any point, no drama or anything. My thought was that even if something doesn’t look super stylish, someone somewhere is always having dramatic development, and that that character’s feelings are always fluid and changing, so I tried to capture that in the visuals. I wanted to depict the changes in feelings that happen when people communicate—not just conversations as simple back-and-forths.
I actually think that the character development, the way the characters’ emotions evolve, is more important than the action in Dan Da Dan, and so I really tried to make sure all the minute details were captured on screen. The slowing of the tempo in the dialog-heavy scenes was deliberate—I wanted to make them feel different, to make them stand out.
io9: What’s been the most challenging part of bringing Dan Da Dan to life through animation?
Yamashiro: I wanted to avoid making visuals that didn’t have a specific point to them whenever possible. The visuals are there to express something—more than anything I wanted to avoid adding things just because they’re cool, because they feel good, or because they’ll work as a stopgap to tie things together. I thought about the best way to express the characters’ situations and feelings, as well as the shifts in emotions throughout the scene, and tried to only compose scenes with visuals that really felt necessary.
I’d think to myself, “Why is this image necessary?” before adding things. I don’t think that I really managed it, but that’s where my soul is, where my ideal is when I’m working on a project. I want to make things that are well-designed, beautiful, and highly polished.
io9: In the Dan Da Dan theatrical screening interview, you mentioned that you have a notebook filled with blocking and framing for you to refer back to with different framing and blocking while working on the show. Do you often refer back to it as a bible for directing Dan Da Dan? Have your framing ideas come from directors you’ve seen in other anime or films, or do you come up with these ideas spontaneously and jot them down as they come to you?
Yamashiro: My notebook is mostly for my own study. I use it to keep record of what directorial techniques and what visuals directors and visual creators use in their works, so that I can analyze them. This goes for any film, any piece of media, but there’s something the creators want to say in a project or in an individual scene. There’s always some kind of intention or aim from the production side. I like to figure out what those are, to solve those puzzles and analyze them.
Direction is really interesting, you know? Changing the time when information appears, or even a single bit of camerawork, can totally change the feeling of the scene. It makes me feel like maybe magic is real. I’m still very much a beginner, so I feel like I need to look at what the great directors before me have done and take inspiration from them, take different ideas and put them together into new ways. I was very careful to ensure that these techniques were ‘sublimated’ into the project, rather than having it stop at parody.
io9: Yukinobu Tatsu revealed that he read up on shojo manga to inform how he approached Dan Da Dan’s romance between Okarun and Momo Ayase. Has the Dan Da Dan animation team had to go through a similar routine researching romance series to get further ideas for accentuating the ensuing romance in the show?
Yamashiro: I wasn’t really thinking about shojo manga, but for romantic scenes, I tried the hardest to make those feel natural and realistic.
Regarding the tempo, the show is generally about 1.25x the speed of normal anime. I tried not to add pauses anywhere. However, with romantic scenes, where we see the inner feelings of characters, or scenes where characters are alone, I made sure to add proper pauses there. I think variation in tempo can have a great effect on people, that feeling of a “gap” between extremes.
I think it might be easy to understand if you look at the scene with the classical guitar in episode five. Didn’t that feel different from what came before? Okarun and Momo are aware of each other here—they must have been feeling different emotions from normal. I wanted to have the audience experience those emotions vicariously through them.
io9: What have you learned from working on other anime projects that has served you in directing Dan Da Dan?
Yamashiro: I tried to put everything I’ve learned so far into this project. I served as an assistant to director Masaaki Yuasa (Devilman Crybaby, Ping Pong the Animation, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!) for a long time, and I think that had a big effect on how I think about projects and how I work. I don’t think I’d exist today without that experience, and I value it very dearly.
All 12 episodes of Dan Da Dan are streaming on Crunchyroll, Hulu, and Netflix, and season two is coming soon.
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