Dan Da Dan director explains anime’s major change from manga in episode one

Eagle-eyed Dan Da Dan fans have likely spotted a discrepancy in the anime’s first episode that differs from the manga. We got to speak to the show’s director, Fuga Yamashiro, about his decision to make this change.

Dan Da Dan is one of the most highly-anticipated anime of the Fall season, scheduled to hit streaming services on October 3, 2024.

The series’ first episode premiered at Anime Expo over the summer, and quite a few fans have already gotten a peek at the eye-popping action it promises months ahead of its release.

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

Manga-readers have probably noticed a slight difference in episode one’s big climax. When Momo’s spiritual powers awaken as she’s being abducted by the Serpoian aliens, there’s a flashback to the beginning of the episode when she unsuccessfully kicked her scumbag ex-boyfriend during an argument — a fight she decidedly lost.

This moment coincides with Momo kicking one of the aliens, dramatically freeing herself from their clutches. It makes for a far more impactful scene, showing her growth as a character and her newfound empowerment as a spirit medium.

However, in the manga, this callback is not present during her scuffle with the Serpoians. We got the chance to quiz Dan Da Dan’s director, Fuga Yamashiro, about his choice to insert this moment during the episode’s climax — a moment he feels the manga’s author, Yukinobu Tatsu, likely also wanted to include but couldn’t.

“I added the kick in because I felt that the author had probably wanted to add it too, but that
he couldn’t because it would have disrupted the flow in manga form, so he had to take it out,” Yamashiro told us.

“My intention was to replicate what the author wanted using the specific strengths of the medium I was working in — adding a short insert like that works as a flashback in animation thanks to the sense of speed and rhythm inherent to the medium.

“I felt it was important to form a dramatic catharsis in the scene, content wise. Compare it to the
opening scene, where Momo tries to kick her boyfriend but he blocks it, but after meeting
Okarun and facing her own past and feelings, she’s able to grow and change a bit internally,
allowing her to land the kick on the Serpoian, sending him flying!”

Dan Da Dan is already shaping up to be one of the biggest premiers of the Fall anime season, and it’s all thanks to little details like this that make an already outstanding story even more impactful.

Of course, we can’t discount the eye-popping action sequences and jaw-dropping fight scenes that Dan Da Dan manages to flawlessly translate from the manga’s black-and-white pages. For Yamashiro, making each fight scene into its own story is an important part of successfully pulling these moments off in an animated format.

“The manga is full of cool panels one after the other, and it never feels like it lets up,” Yamashiro said. “Connecting all of those with natural acting was quite difficult. I put a lot of effort into making sure fight scenes, for example, weren’t just a bunch of cool shots, but rather a kind of story in and of themselves.”

For Yamashiro, discovering the rhythm of each episode and translating the visuals from a storyboard to moving, breathing animation is the funnest part of bringing Dan Da Dan to life — something he says is also a pretty difficult task to manage.

“What we call ‘cutting’ in Japanese, where we decide the timing of the episode, was the most
fun part of adapting Dan Da Dan for me,” he explained. You create the rhythm of the visuals at this step, and start to see the final form of the episode for the first time.

“Of course, you can visualize what the episode will look like to an extent reading the storyboard, but in this process you actually turn it into visuals. Deciding upon a proper tempo can be really hard work!”

Fans can watch Dan Da Dan on Crunchyroll and Netflix starting October 3, or catch the first three episodes in theaters prior to release from August to September.