Sakamoto Days’ Anime Isn’t Living Up to the Hype

With a publishing stable housing giants like Dragon Ball and One Piece, Shonen Jump is a brand name that anime and manga fans associate with “the next big thing.” So, it stands to reason that the Sakamoto Days anime would attract substantial hype.

Unfortunately, this adaptation of Yuto Suzuki’s action-comedy series has been missing its mark with fans. In a similar vein to The Way of the Househusband and Spy x Family, Sakamoto Days transplants high-octane action into mundane, everyday settings. In this case, the premise is that revered and feared hitman Taro Sakamoto hangs up his guns to settle down, start a family, and run a convenience store. When his retirement is exposed to the criminal world, a bounty is placed on his head. He then spends much of the series dodging assassination attempts while keeping his wife and daughter none the wiser.

The manga has been serialized since 2020 in Weekly Shonen Jump and built enough of a fanbase and print circulation to warrant an animated version, which began in January with episodes streaming weekly on Netflix. While Sakamoto Days never had the insta-hype of the more adventurous Chainsaw Man or the darker and deeper Jujutsu Kaisen, the manga features some beautifully drawn spreads and balances its action and comedic beats well with more heartfelt, familial moments – the same moments that make the aforementioned Spy x Family, in particular, so endearing. In other words, it’s a solid foundation to build a rising shonen franchise on.

Early concerns about the anime were raised when the first trailer was released, with fans critical of the animation quality in particular. These criticisms intensified after the show premiered, and it’s hard to argue with them: while TMS Entertainment’s work is far from the worst (certainly by Seven Deadly Sins or 2016’s CGI Berserk standards), it does feel lackluster. The sharp fluidity of the manga’s best pages lost their edge in animation and some of the backdrops are awkwardly sparse. In addition, the paper textures director Masaki Watanabe incorporates distract against the flat visuals instead of adding extra points of interest. None of this has been helped by complaints from Japanese fans on social media that the studio allegedly deleted negative comments on the trailer’s YouTube page.

Related: Spy X Family Is Officially Getting a Third Season

Low quality animation doesn’t automatically equate to bad storytelling or humor. The anime adaptation of fellow Jump series Mashle, for instance, is animated by A-1 Pictures in a style that mirrors the amateurish quality of the manga’s earlier chapters. Mashle is highly reminiscent of the original webcomic art for One-Punch Man and, both being gag comics, there’s an implicit allowance from readers that rougher drawings heighten rather than detract from the parodical nature of the material. In the more professionally drawn manga and anime versions of One-Punch Man, this works in reverse: the detail of the more serious action moments is counterbalanced with the now iconic egg-like Saitama expressions. The Sakamoto Days animation is neither deliberately bad nor good enough to help its humor land, creating a less discussed issue: the anime just isn’t funny enough for an action-comedy.

Again, Spy x Family serves as a strong point of comparison, with the comedic conceit of a spy having to maintain a believable cover as a husband and father driving the story’s plot and character development. In placing more emphasis on the assassins and underdeveloping the convenience store angle, the civilian and hitman elements are more jarring than they are cohesive in Sakamoto Days, squandering a fun premise to become a much more standard battle shonen. This isn’t aided by uninspired visual storytelling that allows comedy sequences to fall as flat as the action. Compared to the laugh-out-loud wackiness of recent predecessors Delicious In Dungeon and Dandadan, it just doesn’t hold up.

Comparison, which I’ve been doing a lot here, is perhaps the biggest contributor to disappointment in Sakamoto Days – as well as an additional underpinning of the anime’s hype. Studios like Trigger, Science Saru, and MAPPA have raised the bar in the last several years for mainstream shonen anime. Even the One Piece anime has received impressive animation overhauls that push the boundaries on what can be done with weekly, long-running anime.

If you’ve not read the manga, Sakamoto Days isn’t a bad watch by any stretch of the imagination. But under the weight of fan expectation, more creative competition, and the high precedent set by the Shonen Jump brand, the anime’s hopes of being a modern classic might have been crushed for good.