Takopi's Original Sin

Sixteen chapters, six episodes, nothing softened

Taizan 5 finished the manga in sixteen chapters, serialised on Shonen Jump+ between December 2021 and March 2022. The second volume sold close to 200,000 copies in its first week. The adaptation runs six episodes, and it was the first series ENISHIYA handled as lead studio.

Director Shinya Iino, who also wrote the series composition, has said the team did not hide the material, shy away from it or soften it, and wanted it as realistic as the manga had it. What that leaves on screen is a gap the show never closes: an alien sent to hand out happiness, an opening theme called Happy Lucky Chappy, and a primary school where none of it applies. Yoshiaki Fujisawa wrote the score.

The Story

Takopi lands on Earth with a bag of gadgets built to make people happy and attaches himself to Shizuka Kuze, a nine-year-old who is bullied at school. He decides to fix her life with the gadgets, which is roughly what an alien with no grasp of human cruelty would decide.

Sixteen chapters across six episodes leave the story room to sit still. Iino has said this was built for streaming rather than television, which kept the running times flexible, and that a manga can turn on a page where an anime cannot: what anime has instead is time.

The Ideal Audience

Six episodes, released between late June and early August 2025, streamed outside Asia by Crunchyroll, and preceded by content warnings that producer Kotaro Sudo called uncommon in anime and important to them. The New Zealand Classification Office publishes it at 18, on a rating Crunchyroll submitted itself, and lists what sits behind that number: bullying with realistic physical violence, domestic violence, two killings shown with blood, one of them a girl killing her mother, a graphic portrayal of suicide, scenes portraying escorting and prostitution, coarse language. Watch it if you would rather have something short and punishing than something long and comfortable, and not on a bad week.